Grannypants

According to the Sun and New York Magazine, with all the madness around Mad Men and the 60s these days, thong sales are down because women are now into high-waisted pants. A couple things here. I watch a lot of Mad Men, OK? And I don't exactly remember chicks wearing those high-waisted pants. There seem to be a whole lot of dresses going on. An image search on Betty Draper looking for pants looks has been fruitless.

But in any case, I seriously doubt that the same girls who were buying thongs so that people could see them when their waistband rode below their asscracks are now wearing LBJ-years-inspired high-waisted pants. Or, oh! Am I screwing up the British word for pants? I guess they mean underpants...

Alright then, it seems that now UNDERPANTs are elephant style now, and cover the bellybutton. Who would've thought. Maybe the History Channel will make a show about heretic burning in the 15th century and chastity belts will come back in vogue.

"10 tragic moments in pants"

Salon.com just had a feature in Broadsheet, "10 tragic moments in pants", a venomous attack on any sort of non-normative cut of pants. Very unscientific. More later...

Eldridge Cleaver's Penis Pants

The black activist and author behind Soul on Ice put the royalties towards developing Eldridge Cleaver Ltd., which aspired to create pants more sympathetic to the male form:

"We've been castrated in clothing, and my pants open up new vistas. I'm against penis binding. Mean wear their penis either down the right pants leg or the left. Now, if you cut away a piece of the material on wither side you'll see that the penis is strapped to the leg. Pants were orignially designed to corral the penis." Eldridge Cleaver, from Jet Magazine, 1978.

Via Dangerous Minds

Things Fall Apart

The Suddeutsche Zeitung reports on the comeback of the jogging pant to the runway in a little photo essay (in German) called "Sacks that Call Themselves Pants" which chronicles Alexander Wang's (see above) de-hag of the baggy bags. This falls, I suppose, firmly within the postmodern camp, in that the low sign signifies the high or whatever. I suppose it would earn the designation of post-post modern if the banality of it's high-low mixup elicited no comment at all?

the biggest pants in the world

en mexico, por supuesto

history of pantyhose

though not pants per se, a bipedal phenomenon nontheless, check out here a history of pantyhose

a terribly relevant commentary on pants by fashion/cultural observer genius bill cunningham