The long road to social acceptance for sweatpants
SWEATPANTS have long suffered from an image problem as the clothing of choice for layabouts and the unemployed. But in recent years sweatpants have gradually discarded their low-brow reputation, carving out an increasingly prominent space for themselves in the fashion world in the process.
The Munich-based fashion designer Sebastian Kaiser, for example, has created a line of sweatpants made from particularly high-quality fabrics. With their stylish tight cut and plaid patterns, Kaiser’s designs could almost be mistaken for normal fabric trousers from a distance – you have to look very carefully to realise what they are.
“Sweatpants mean freedom and the end of the work day for me,” says Kaiser, whose label Boulezar, founded in 2012, sells sweatpants made from high-priced materials like Italian jersey and even fabrics from Japan.
Kaiser said he sells about 600 pairs of sweatpants per year. Celebrities like actor Samuel L. Jackson and Madonna also have been spotted wearing his creations. Indeed, it appears to be merely a question of time before sweatpants finally become socially acceptable to wear in public.
“Sweatpants are indispensable to out society today,” said Kaiser. “I bet even the Queen has a pair – or at least some comfy pants she wears around the house.”
Kaiser isn’t alone in his enthusiasm for stylishly cut sweatpants made of expensive materials either. “Cosmopolitan” magazine declared that business looks can be styled with the “new sweatpants”, while the fashion industry has taken to using different terms like “track pants” to set designer trousers with a more stylish, urban look apart from functional sports wear, or the pair of “joggers”.
To stylist Bernhard Roetzel, it makes no difference whether sweatpants are made of cheap or expensive fabrics – they’re still merely sportswear.
“Sweatpants are sweatpants,” he says. “And they’re called that because people sweat in them.”
For Roetzel, sweatpants are still “the most tasteless pants next to cut-off denim hot pants.” Jeans underwent a similar transformation in acceptance over decades but have still proven unable to tear down some stylistic boundaries, he noted.
“Jeans are worn a lot,” says Roetzel. “But Prince Charles in Jeans? That would still seem odd.” Simply calling sweatpants “designer clothes” won’t change anything, he argues.
Still, the creeping acceptance of sweatpants in daily life continues – as a glance at any packed subway car around the world shows. Gerd Mueller-Thomkins of the German Fashion Institute see this as part of a large paradigm shift where the styles of sweatpants and everyday pants converge. – dpa