Loose, Baggy Pants Syndrome -- Origins?

Factual Questions
21

They just had one like five years ago. Did you miss that whole 9 months of “Swing is back”?

22

There are two different baggy pants looks which happen to roughly converge, the skater thing and the hip hop thing. The former is supposedly more practical (I don’t think this is the case; it goes back & forth for skaters… in the 80s it was fat wheels & thin pants, now those have been reversed).

The latter is completely aping baggy beltless prison wear, part of the reason is p.o.'s older African-American parents who worked hard to stay out of prison. The oversized white T-shirt seems to come out of that as well.

If anyone doubts the baggy/prison connection, I present to you the popular State Property clothing line. (The hidden pockets and holsters seem to be Beanie Sigel’s idea.)

:rolleyes:

23

I can dig it, Daddy-O.

About the baggy pants, I’ve also heard that they came into style as an aid to shoplifters, who could stuff and obscure all sorts of stuff in the pants and make it less obvious that they were stealing.

24
      • I worked at a gas station at one point and this is very true. And the guys dressed “hip-hop” were notorious shoplifters, no doubt about it. These guys would come in wearing long baggy pants and jackets when it was 85 degrees outside. Most were black kids, some were white + other races. Fashion, my ass. If you wear super-baggy FUBU-style clothes into a store, ESPECIALLY when its way too warm to be wearing long clothes, you are pretty much considered to be a thief.
        ~
25

Heh, as opposed to the work-dress uniforms worn by the Air Force (and presumably the other services) where your pants have to be belted up at your “high waist” (ie: your belly button, a neat trick if you’ve got a potbelly like me) I’m still pretty sure that the reason dress uniforms have all the ribbons and such on the top portion of the shirt is to keep people from noticing where you keep your belt. :smiley:

And I decided long ago that some people like to pretend they can’t dress themselves because they think it’s cool to act like idiots. Actually, this fits with most things people I know from high school and college do, in general. (My room mate and I have a philosophy that stupidity should be painful)

Hey, has anyone ever met one of those folks who, when encountering folks who wear their pants like that, offer to staple them in place so they don’t fall down?

26

If this is true, why did baggy pants just come into fashion comaparatively recently? Were there no poor neighborhoods before 1990?

27

Good question. Well, I’ll kick out a couple ideas-- that I have no cites or evidence for-- but maybe…

  1. there was a gradual fadeout of community clothes-sharing, leaving families to work only with what they already had in their homes.

  2. maybe clothes in poor neighborhoods did have a certain element of bagginess to them in the past, but as the style became more prominent, the bagginess increased exponentially as clothes were specially designed to have that appearance.

  3. as bagginess became more popular, it went from being a trend localized in poor areas to being a fashion statement depicted in the mass media, and its prominence in many social arenas (read: the suburbs) began to take off, thereby causing a larger percentage of the population (who had no familiarity with it before) to notice it.

Again, just kicking around some ideas. I don’t know, the prison thing doesn’t ring true to me.

28

I have heard that the trend towards baggy shorts started with Michael Jordan, when he was playing college hoops at UNC. He started wearing his shorts a size or 2 bigger than the tighties at the time for comfort, and as his popularity rose, others started copying. By the time he was in the NBA, he became really popular, and the copying went all out amongst kids. Everybody wanted to be “like Mike”. Eventually it may have spilled over to the skateboarding popularity crowd, or at least happened at the same time.

Don’t know how true that is, but it certainly seems to coincide with the time frames I have noticed for this offense, which should be a capital one in my book.

29

A D.J. friend (that is ‘radio DJ’, not ‘club DJ’) said that the rise (pun?) of baggy, falling-off-the-hips look as to be traced back to prisons.

However, his spin on it was that those sporting that “look” were in fact sending coded signals to the others of the prison population indicating that the were open to becoming the ‘bitch’ half of a couple.

I doubt that’s really the case. I think he secretly hoped that he would single-handedly wipe out that look by having others make that association also.

30

Yep. That’s what my understanding of how baggy pants oringinated. (Gangs in LA)
But the theme carried through the years.
And yes, I wore low-slung lee’s in my hoodlum youth. :wink:

31

I always thought it was a way of sending a message to the opposite sex that their “package” was so big that they needed the extra lower crotch just to hold it all in.

32

I think its a fashion statement saying I am still a little boy, I"m wearing my dad’s pants. Sortof a way of saying “I’m cool, yet not a serious adult.”

33

I blame Michael Jordan. He started the whole big baggy shorts in the NBA, and it just migrated from shorts on the basketball courts to trousers on the street.

34

I remember it from back in 7th grade, about 1990. Doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon.

35

I have no idea where they originated, but I was thinking the other day about clothing trends since the 1950s and the oddity of life. Don’t clothing trends in industrialized countries best represent the absurdity and brevity of life?

:smiley: So anyways, I think baggy clothes have been so popular and will remain so b/c they look and feel comfortable and loose, like the lives of the people who wear them. Now, of course w/o a belt you have to pull them up repeatedly as we’ve said and that’s impractical, and gang members certainly live no comfortable lives, but I think these clothes and their lack-of-statement and non-revealing attributes fit the attitude and self-awareness of the past decade and a half- no one could walk around clubs looking like Prince these days. No one. :wink:

36

Oh yeah, that too- jerseys and such can be inexpensive and used for the court and street wear! Of course then they have lines of jerseys for just street wear… I don’t get that trend.

37

Here is one opinion:

However, I remember baggy shorts and jeans being popular in the late 70’s among the sufer crowd. While most were wearing the supershort OP cord shorts like Magnum PI, some guys were wearing long loose shorts that went to the knee. In fact, they were called “bags” or “baggies.” I believe that Birdwell and Katins were popular brand at the time (I moved from the beach, I have no idea what surfers wear now). I guess you could say that they were simply wider cut bermuda shorts from the 50’s that were intended to be worn low on your waist. I remember wearing Vans and way to big “shrink to fit 501” Levis and having people compliment me on my “baggies.” I believe this contributed to the skaters wearing bags (since there were surfer/skaters and surfers with little brother skaters ect). How the hip hop guys got a hold of it in the 80’s I am not sure- maybe it came from SoCal hip hop guys from their contact with the Surfer/Skater culture and spread East.

38

I think we can reliably say that there are enough origin stories that it’s not possible to determine the actual origins of the look. The shoplifting thing is certainly not born out amongst the raver kids, at least, who (when I was in high school at least) tended to wear pants that extended about a foot below the feet, making a quick getaway pretty much impossible.

39

Snopes embraces the prison garb origin, while deriding some other connections: Sag Harbored

40

Thanks for all the replies! This has been an interesting thread!