by But that, in the end, could be the greatest fantasy related to clothing: that is, that any of us can discover it and reach a point of such self-knowledge that we no longer make mistakes. The way you look in clothes is, in fact, a deeply flawed and paradoxical marker of self-knowledge, because the way you look in clothes is not, ultimately, up to you alone. It depends on other people. Furthermore, as with any social pact, it is subject to an inescapable and constantly changing set of historical contingencies and aesthetic renegotiations or, as we colloquially describe them, trends.
That’s why David Lynch has never found his perfect pair of pants. Because David Lynch’s perfect pants, like David Lynch’s perfect self, do not and cannot exist. That impossibility could drive us crazy, or we could accept it, take it as a license to play with how we see ourselves, to keep testing the limits of our comfort zones, trying on different selves, one pair of pants at a time. From this point of view, Noah Garfinkel’s joke that “you should always wear pants that you think look stupid” might contain some of the wisest style advice I’ve ever encountered: Your capacity for stupidity is how you know that you are still alive.
Recently, a late-period portrait of Miles Davis, as universal an avatar of cool as modernity has produced, circulated in style-centric corners of the Internet. This wasn’t the dapper, circa-1950s, button-down Oxford, slim-pants Miles Davis we’re used to seeing. He has long hair and tiny sunglasses. He is leaning against a white Ferrari Testarossa. His name is on the license plate. But none of that is the point. The focal point is Davis’s enormous pants. They are tan, with deep pleats and a sky-high waist, and they pool behind the tongues of his white loafers like tidal waves converging on a pair of boats. They are large but not unstructured: they echo and expand their stance with elegant excess, in the same way that a sail echoes and expands in the wind. They look tremendously, magnificently, inspiringly stupid.
I think there’s a lesson in this image for those of us who wear pants, even the 100 percent of us who aren’t Miles Davis. As I write this paragraph, I’m sitting in a pair of dusty eggplant-colored, wide-leg, double-pleated corduroy pants. When I look at them, they seem stupid in the most pleasantly strange and personally appropriate way possible. When I get up and walk, the way they slosh around my legs seems even more stupid. I love them. Maybe the best thing I can do is hope that my pants feel that way for a long time, and that if the day comes when they don’t, I won’t be too tired or too proud to look for another pair of pants. this stupid
Stylist: Karolyn Pho. Hairdresser: David Searle. Makeup: Sara Tagaloa.
Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer based in Oakland, California. He writes Blackbird Spyplane, a style and culture newsletter, with Erin Wylie.
