The Case Against Joggers
It has come to my attention that it has been over a month since I complained about something insignificant.
That is unacceptable.
If you’re familiar with FS’s “The Case Against” series, you are aware of my feelings regarding certain darlings of menswear, from denim jackets and white sneakers, to henleys and totes.
Today, I’m tangling with joggers.
Or “jogger pants”, as they were called some years ago before they become so popular on menswear sites that everyone just started calling them joggers.
These skinny sweatpants have been around long enough to glide past “on trend” into “oh yeah, doesn’t everyone wear them?”
It seems they do.
But should they? Hardly.
I might be alone on this, but I wasn’t aware that regular ol’ sweatpants needed an upgrade. I mean, what were we using our sweatpants for? Working out or lounging around at home, mostly. They needed to be loose and comfortable to not be constricting and allow for a wide range of motion.
And that’s one of the crucial flaws with joggers. They are a less-useful variation of sweatpants because they are a slimmer fit.
Joggers are trying to be “tailored” sweatpants that you can wear places other than the gym or the privacy of your own home. But this feels like an answer to a question no one asked. If you absolutely need to run an errand in sweatpants, I doubt you really care about how you look in the first place. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, since you might be coming straight from the gym or something. In these kinds of circumstances, I certainly don’t need my sweatpants to look “nice”. I was just working out, I don’t care about how I look. If I really cared about how I looked in that moment, I wouldn’t go out in public in sweatpants.
Therefore, joggers have no purpose.
You’re not going to magically go from “unacceptable” to “acceptable” by swapping your sweatpants for joggers.
I feel that the intention that some men have to step up their style game from sweatpants is a noble one. However, they have been misled into thinking that joggers are the answer.
But here is a simpler reason for why joggers aren’t worth it.
They just plain look bad.
Unfortunately, clothing manufacturers make a lot of their money simply by changing something random and marketing it as “new” and “different”. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the change was good, however.
You see this all the time with women’s clothes. Women’s fashion cycles move more quickly than men’s, so you see more drastic swings of the pendulum when it comes to women’s clothing. Changes in menswear occur more slowly, but they still happen.
Joggers are an example of a change that was made to a product that didn’t need tampering in the first place. If regular sweatpants are good enough for Rocky Balboa, they’re good enough for me.
If you’re built like a running back, then joggers will look good on you, because they will highlight your muscular legs. For the rest of the male population, joggers will make it look like you have giant hips, little skinny chicken legs, and floppy, Sideshow Bob feet. Oh, and they’ll make you look short because of how they aggressively taper at the ankle.
Just because something is wildly popular doesn’t mean it looks good, is flattering, or is an improvement over what was available prior.
In one of my previous jobs, I did a presentation for my team about suit proportions. I explained how skinny suits, while certainly popular (especially among the young and fit), actually make a man look rather womanly.
The miniscule lapels of a skinny suit jacket shrink a man’s shoulders and rob him of a strong V-shaped torso. The short jacket length and tight, low-rise pants make him look hippy and pear-shaped.
It’s like that scene in The Office when Michael realizes he is wearing a woman’s suit.
Any objective observer would recognize that these suits were not an improvement over the prior, more fully-cut, iterations. But the pendulum had swung, suit companies needed to boost sales, and men were duped into thinking that skinny suits looked better.
That’s what happened with joggers. They don’t look better than regular sweatpants, they are just more popular.
Oh, and don’t forget more expensive!
It’s not a style upgrade to wear joggers instead of regular sweatpants. You’re still wearing sweatpants. So, if you need sweatpants, the $15 Target version is perfectly fine.
Please don’t waste your hard-earned money on joggers thinking that your regular sweatpants are somehow inferior.
