# Important Rules for Sagging Your Pants **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [November 24, 2004, 6:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432 "2004-11-24T06:39:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2004, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/61 "2004-11-27T18:21:01Z")
> [@Brynda](#): > > I read (sorry, no cite, can’t remember) that it started as an emulation of guys going to jail without belts, hence the saggy pants. That makes sense of a development of the existing trend towards outsized clothing – if your pants fit, there’s not much of a noticible sag when you leave off the belt. > [@](#): > > Regardless of the origin, though, most fashions are meant to emphasize something attractive on the body. Short legs and what looks like a full diaper just don’t do that, for me at least. Most fashions, yeah-- but I don’t think big baggy pants are the only exception to this sensible rule-- lots of faddish fashions are totally uncomplimentary to the human form. In the eighties, we had moon boots, those ugly-assed brightly-dyed feather roach-clips girls wore in their hair, plastic jackets with varying combinations of fluorescent pink and green, belts made from telephone cord, wearing mismatched sneakers, socks over pantlegs, all that good stuff. Then, as now, folks who bought into these fashions were mocked by folks who didn’t, but they didn’t care because they knew that they were _cool_. Of course they later came to understand that they looked like total morons and regret any documentary evidence of their sheepish dress-sense that persists, just like the legions of droopy-drawered youth will be embarrassed in another decade. People who place more concern on whether or not their clothes look good than on whether or not they look _popular_ have always been and will always be spared this embarassment. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2004, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/62 "2004-11-27T21:24:58Z")
> [@START](#): > > For some reason people that think the whole style looks stupid, think that the people who wear it care what anybody thinks…like the guy who came up to my friend and I and told us that are pants were really low, as if we didn’t know. > > I would also like to say that I do not always sag my pants and I like suits so I am versatile when it comes to my style choices. “Sagging jeans or a suit looking clean when I’m on the scene…” No. Don’t be silly. Baggy pants are a hell of a lot harder to walk with and many wearers seem to need to constantly pull their pants up to prevent their falling off. Especially the ridiculously baggy ones that make it appear that each leg is wearing its own ball gown. It’s a lot of trouble to take if you don’t “care what anybody thinks.” Besides, why would there be rules about what sort of underwear to wear underneith if you don’t “care what anybody thinks”? Why wouldn’t you just be wearing whatever is most comfortable if you don’t “care what anybody thinks”? Nope. I don’t buy it. You might not care what your parents think, but you’re dressing in a certain way in order to fit in with the styles popular with teenagers. Being only a couple years out of teenagerhood, I can remember that (though thankfully I never made a fool of myself by dressing like you do.) I mean, hey, dress the way your peer group dresses if you like. But certain styles look bad. Baggy pants simply look ridiculous and uncomfortable; they deemphasize the shape of the human body. Good-looking styles work to enhance the shape of the body; men’s suits, for example, make the wearer appear taller, and the tie is a vague phallic symbol - they’re classic because they emphasize the masculinity of the wearer. Hence the fact that men’s suits haven’t changed very greatly over the years. A properly tailored suit enhances the shape of the body to make the wearer appear closer to the ideal body shape. In contrast, baggy clothes make the wearer disappear into the mountain of fabric around them, and it’s the sort of thing that will seem instantly stupid as soon as its out of fashion. Of course, fashions come and go, but there’s a difference between the fashions that look stupid ten years hence and the ones that still look good. While most women wouldn’t dress today like Jackie Kennedy did during the sixties, she’s still regarded as a fashion icon. She wore clothes that simply made her look good, and even if the styles have changed since then, no one questions that she dressed wonderfully. Photos of her from forty years ago don’t look embarrassing or silly to us now. Hip-hop fashions already look stupid to outsiders; they will seem sillier and sillier as you get older, START. > [@Brynda](#): > > street credibility You know, I don’t think I’ve _ever_ seen “credibility” written out in this phrase. It amuses me. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2004, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/63 "2004-11-27T22:36:40Z")
Good post, **Excalibre**. **START** , something that will eventually become clear to you is the difference between genuine cool and manufactured cool. Don’t think for a second that you and your friends are determining what’s “cool.” The seamier (no pun) elements in the fashion industry cynically dictate what’s cool and what’s not, in order to enrich themselves at the expense of vulnerable consumers. An important strategy is artifically creating value for commercial products that are, _by design_, intended to become liabilities in the short term, using different techniques for planned obsolescence. The people who dictate the flavour of the month aren’t the ones wearing the clothes. These people dress well. They can afford to dress well by getting gullible consumers to dress foolishly. They don’t think the people who are wearing their products are cool – they think they’re chumps. The instant a new line is off the shelves and the money’s in the bank, the same media cues that convinced you to buy your current wardrobe start telling you that only the hopelessly clueless are still wearing _those_ clothes. Take a look at what the ‘unpopular’ characters in teen movies and sitcoms are wearing – it’s not fashions from two years ago, or clothes that were never very trendy. They’re wearing the clothes the were held up as trendy a few _months_ ago. It’s no accident. ---
**Author:** ![START](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2bfe46/32.png) [@START](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/START)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2004, 8:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/64 "2004-11-28T08:25:15Z")
Sagging is not just a teenage style, this is how my 31 year old uncle dresses most of the time, 31 people not 13. He wears a white rag hanging out of his back pocket (not a gang member) but he is also married, has a daughter, owns a house and nice car. His friends pretty much dress the same way, they have silver chains, backwards hats and all that and honestly even all of them being in their late 20’s and early 30’s look cool to me in their style of dress. The other thing that is good about this particular style is it identifies you with people because if I see someone else wearing the same type of clothes I am, I can safely guess that we have some things in common, I can tell at the very least that we probably like the same type of music. I have made a few friends because we were dressed the same way and could immediately relate to each other. I should say that I don’t care what _certain_ people think, you know how it is when your with your friends it’s like being in your own world with them and people on the outside don’t matter to much. C’mon look at the Goth kids I could say I like the way they look or that they look like freaks but it wouldn’t matter what I thought because I know that they don’t care one way or another. ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2004, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/65 "2004-11-28T20:06:12Z")
Important rule number ONE for sagging your pants: 1. DON’T FUCKING DO IT AT ALL! It makes you look like a total loser. No, you don’t look cool ‘cause you be jailin’, you just look like a frigging braindead waste of skin. Aaarrggghhhh… ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2004, 9:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/66 "2004-11-29T09:54:34Z")
**START** , perhaps you’re the best man to explain this to me. (The saggy pants fashion is present in the UK to some extent, but not anything like as much as in American it would appear…) How low are these pants going? I mean, for there to be a serious risk of your penis popping out? :eek: Whenever I’ve seen this style of dress, the pants have been riding low, like on the hip bones, with a good two or three inches of underpants showing above the waistband… but surely there’s no risk of fallout\* unless they’re much lower than that. \*Obligatory 1980s joke: Q: Why shouldn’t you buy Soviet underpants? A: Chernob’ll fall out… ---
**Author:** ![Fear\_Itself](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fear_itself/32/19637_2.png) [@Fear\_Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fear_Itself)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2004, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/67 "2004-11-29T14:26:29Z")
> [@Colophon](#): > > How low are these pants going? I frequently see kids with their waistband below their buttocks, though they hold them up a little higher in front with one hand. I was standing in a checkout line in a supermarket behind one of those bozos, and as he walked away, I burst out laughing. The checker, a seventeen-year-old girl with too many piercings just glared at me, like I was not reacting they way an old geezer was supposed to. ---
**Author:** ![tagos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@tagos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tagos)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2004, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/68 "2004-11-29T16:40:58Z")
> [@Exgineer](#): > > Actually, the primary rule is - > > Knock that shit off, you look stupid. Just pull your pants up. And turn your ballcap around the right way while you’re at it. preach it brother 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Enright3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/enright3/32/2897_2.png) [@Enright3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enright3)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2004, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/69 "2004-11-29T17:43:12Z")
> [@Exgineer](#): > > Actually, the primary rule is - > > Knock that shit off, you look stupid. Just pull your pants up. And turn your ballcap around the right way while you’re at it. I could deal with the backwards hat, but the one that gets me is the one where it’s rotated only partially around, or worn sideways. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![ReaperMort](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bbe5ce/32.png) [@ReaperMort](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ReaperMort)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2004, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/70 "2004-11-30T05:24:54Z")
> [@Larry Mudd](#): > > I’d like to show these kids video of “hard” kids from the eighties wearing fluorescent pink parachute pants. > > _swish swish __swish swish__ swish swish_ > > “Hey, look at this guy. Pretty cool, eh? Tough look, right?” > > “That’s totally lame!” > > “Yeah, well, he thought he looked pretty cool, because cynical marketing bastards in reasonable looking suits that dictate fashion for the mentally challenged have a cruel sense of humour, and never get tired of making really stupid people easy to make out a distance. Say, where you get _those_ pants? Nice.” Larry, I just have to say that this is one of the best things I have ever read on this board. Thank you. ---
**Author:** ![joyfool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/df788c/32.png) [@joyfool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joyfool)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2004, 6:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/71 "2004-11-30T06:56:58Z")
**Excalibre** now, don’t hold back. Tell us what you _really_ feel about saggy pants. Over here, I simply can’t tell. 😉 As to the assertion that you can’t run in those things, that’s true. However, as someone else (I think) pointed out, you couldn’t run in skin tight pants during the 70s. And chafing? Weren’t those “Hammer” style pants the epitome of that? So, although you might not have been into any of that, the trends do seem to come and go. Faster now then ever before. Therefore, those of us with “wings,” flapper dresses or pink Izods and deck shoes in our past, be kind and remember from whence we came. 'Cause certainly, we could be like those people that end up on Maury or Montel needing a makeover because we’re still stuck somewhere around '59. Lastly **START** , I’m sure you look fine in the context in which you hang out. Perhaps not so much if you were at a Presidential dinner. Guess I just don’t have any problem with that (and man, should you see some of _my_ pictures from high school!) and think it looks kinda cool. If, and I stress that, your jeans don’t fall _below_ your but or _at_ your knees. Then everything’s good. Not to mention, as a female who tends to being overweight upon occasion, I can understand the desire to be covered. This might be why it appeals to some girls. I mean, isn’t this better than seeing a 320 pound woman in a belly shirt and low ride jeans? Think about it. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2004, 12:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/72 "2004-11-30T12:04:10Z")
> [@Fear Itself](#): > > I frequently see kids with their waistband below their buttocks :eek: Got pics? Er, I mean, I have to see just how ridiculous that looks. Are there any photos around of the saggers out and about (as it were)…? ---
**Author:** ![Profane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e47774/32.png) [@Profane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Profane)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2004, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/73 "2004-11-30T13:13:06Z")
Who cares if someone wants to wear saggy pants and backwards hats? The style’s been around for 15+ years, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s the way a subculture chooses to dress, so be it. God forbid people should dress the way they want to, and not the way you think they should be. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Anaamika](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Anaamika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anaamika)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2004, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/74 "2004-11-30T16:47:08Z")
> [@Missy2U](#): > > As an aside, **Exgineer** , I may quite possibly be in love with you. 😃 He’s _mine_. :snarls: He just doesn’t know it yet. 😛 _kidding, kidding. I’m not stalking **exgineer** , honestly._ ---
**Author:** ![START](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2bfe46/32.png) [@START](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/START)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2004, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/75 "2004-12-05T06:36:19Z")
The only reason I am bumping this is that a doper asked how low people wear their pants and I haven’t been able to respond until today. It is very rare for people to wear the front of their pants below their penis, atleast among people I know but some people will wear them with the waist big enough that if they dont have a belt they easily fall below weiner level, as is the case with my brother when he had the sweatshirt over his head the pants went down and his uknowhut came out :smack: . ---
**Author:** ![Cartooniverse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cartooniverse/32/3084_2.png) [@Cartooniverse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartooniverse)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2004, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432/76 "2004-12-05T13:39:10Z")
> [@GraphicsGal](#): > > What I want to know is: what about chafing?..I hear Gold Bond Powder is good. I use it early and often. Good for what ails ya. And, I am getting the feeling that it is completely impossible for a guy with a belly and a tire around his waist to find pants that are **not** totally baggy. I don’t mean falling down baggy. Don’t cotton to that look one bit. But I had a conversation with a female who informed me that men are incapable of shopping for pants that are snug enough in the butt for most women’s tastes. I informed her that pants that would be that snug would be a nightmare on a body type like mine. ( Not apple, not pear…more akin to… watermelon-shaped ). Should I worry about the baggy-assed pants I love to wear? Should I try to shop for more snug pants? Should I find other things to worry about? :dubious: Cartooniverse [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/important-rules-for-sagging-your-pants/276432.md?page=3)