It’s official. This fad has been taken to the extreme beyond which no man can hope to exceed.
Which means…
It’s time to go the other direction!!! Soon you will be seeing teens with their pants around their bellies. The truly bold will wear them up to their armpits.
I was speculating to myself that the pants were somehow sewn onto the boxers. I was wandering through the local “adult novelty” store (doing research for my uh, PhD in sociology, yeah, that’s it) and some kid was sporting this attire. It was disturbing as all get out. Shit when I was that age, those friggen’ spontaneous woodies would pop out at the most inopportune times.
I had heard that it had something to do with prisoners having nothing to do but workout and in the process of getting ripped their pants started to sag around their ass.
This style has way overstayed it’s welcome. It seems like it’s been 15 years, but the mind plays tricks when your brain is being seared. Fortunately, around here, it is no longer a common phenomena and seems anachronistic, sort of like a hippy in 1980. I understand the need to confound one’s elders, but personally, I hate it when my pants won’t stay up.
The hats turning backwards have been my favorite for ages. Specially since I do remember that they’re all copying an Og-damn TV cop! (T.J., the sniper from S.W.A.T.)
Hey, I’m so gangsta, I copy the cops! Yeah!
You took my point!
Anyway, I teach High School in an “urban” area (really a very close-in suburb of D.C. - We’re inside the Beltway), so I see this multiple times a day. In most cases, there really is nothing holding up the pants other than the collective will of everyone else in the room.
In our school chronic offenders of the saggy pants are sent to the office and given what we call the “Jethro Rope” - a length of baler twine meant to evoke the look of Jethro Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies. It has not yet fixed the problem, but it’s funny to see these kids with twine knotted around their pants and thick silver chains hanging around their necks.
I was in highschool in the 80s. This I remember well. Only now, I’ve noticed that people are wearing two polo shirts at the same time with popped collars.
I was an academic tutor for the athletic department when I was in college (a treasure trove of stories, that is) and the football team, at least, was doing this then. They’d come in in their hideous team sweatsuits, pantwaists down around their butts. Urgh.
I used to refuse to help them with anything until they pulled their pants up. I became known in a small way for it. Once, I was at an appointment with a guy and we were going over his work, and one of his buddies wandered up and asked, “Hey, I just wanna know how to spell something. I gotta pull my pants up for that?” 
I’ll take the clocks around the neck over the falling pants any day. The large clocks (ala, Flavor Flav from Public Enemy) were at least practical (you could tell the time from a couple dozen yards away) and funny, the pants thing is just stupid.
In Baltimore, it seems like I don’t see as many baggies strapped around the ass as I do insanely long t-shirts, like down the the knee.
But even that seems less prevalent than it once was. Big logos, big ball caps, and “skull cap” things are still prominent.
Up here the boys wear their caps frontwards, but God forbid the bill be its original shape. No, the sides have to be bent in, like this but even more exaggerated.
I can’t blame them, though, when I think of all the things that had to be “just so” in what I wore or carried.
My brother was in jail in about 1987. When we would go visit him, we absolutely did not see anyone wearing baggy crap like that. Heck, it isn’t like finding mens pants that fit enough for prison life is hard, what? 32 waist? Okidoki.
I was working the other night and I see this guy wearing the baggy pants, the big shirt, all in red, sluffing around praying for gravity deprivation I wasn’t wearing my glasses and I thought to myself “Wow, why would anyone want to dress like they just got out of prison?” Since my experience was that the shirts/pants are always the same color, in my brothers prison, it was hideous orange. No biggie, well, when I get to the guys table, his arms are completely covered in tats, his hands are covered, the neck everything and boy howdy does he have the ganster/jailbird thing going on, he even has the tattood tear coming down from his eye.*
I can think of many ways NOT looking like I just walked out of the local pokey would benefit me. I guess I never wanted to look like a criminal, or associate with criminals, or make people think I’m a criminal. Heck, even my brother, who was once a criminal, wouldn’t want that.
Now get off my ever lovin’ lawn, and take yer britches with ya!
*He was very nice and polite and pleasant at the table. Not what you would expect, so maybe he was trying to challenge our predjuices.
The urban fashion trend that I always thought looked stupid (and you often see it in conjunction with the saggy-baggy pants crowd) is to wear your baseball cap with the stickers still on it. I saw one of those last night on a guy at a fast-food place–he was wearing a black baseball cap with the brim perfectly flat, and two holographic stickers on it–one on each side of the brim. I couldn’t get close enough to read them, but one looked like it had the size on it.
I asked about this on the Dope awhile back and was informed that the best guess for why they do this is that they like to advertise the fact that they bought expensive, real-deal sports gear (as opposed to knockoffs). Well, fine. I just think they look like modern-day Minnie Pearls. 
I’ll never forget the redneck white boy I saw playing basketball in the neighborhood I was living in about 10 years ago. The puddling pants had just made it here then, I think. Anyway, redneck teen boy kept yanking his not-too-big jeans down so that his tighty whitey underwear would show.
Not only was he a believer in this stupid pants-falling-down fashion, he was so stupid he was trying to make his correctly fitting jeans conform to it! I got a good snicker out of that one.
That actually serves a practical purpose. Bending the sides of the brim down helps keep sunlight out of your eyes without actually having to bring the whole thing down over your eyes so you can’t see.
Of course, as with all things, it can get silly if taken to a crazy extreme.
Hey, I saw this in the '80’s. I worked in a place that sold baseball caps (among other things), and my first thought was that these were guys who had shoplifted the caps and didn’t give a crap whether I knew or not. I was set straight on that, but it made me wonder if that isn’t how the style originated: “Yeah, I ripped this off.”
Nope, gotta disagree - while teenage fads are generally extreme, they are usually at least an attempt to be “sexy” in some way - lots of people find the flapper look sexy; beehives, disco, Maddonna – all were found “sexy” by at least some people at the time, oldsters included (the styles were considered “shameless”, “immoral” etc.). It is only in retrospect, after a reaction against their ubiquity and absurdity set in, that they seem silly.
At the other extreme there is of course stuff like punk.
The difference here is that just about everyone can at once see that wearing pants that make you look like an ill-dressed toddler, and actually impede your ability to walk without your pants falling down, is amusing rather than sexy, slutty, intimidating, etc. 
But do you remember who popularized the look? Tell me that’s not sexy. AND intimidating.
The fact that people got stupid with it doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be sexy initially. Really, I’m sure nearly ALL the guys still doing it think they’re just that hot. :rolleyes:
I think the really big t-shirts look like smocks, or little Eighties’ dresses.
Mark Wahlberg (however you spell his name) looks fine, but he isn’t accessorizing his silly pants with a truly enormous knee-length t-shirt, and his pants are only a little silly. It’s more like a hip-hugger look than the ‘comical-duck-walk’ look.
Around here in the past few months it seems the trend is to wear the bills completely flat.
Oh. My. God.
I think I just saw that guy last night going into a Walmart. We were in the car waiting for the wife to return when we saw two young white kids get out of a car. One of them was wearing normal jeans (light blue, faded, typical Levis), and he actually pulled them down past his waist in an effort to ‘adjust’ them so that his boxers were showing.
He was wearing a belt.
Complete asshat dork.
Then, of course, he had to do the duck walk all the way into (and I would imagine throughout) the store.
Dammit. No wonder I can’t keep up! ::gets out steamer and very heavy books
