In menswear circles, there is no topic more hotly debated or endlessly vexing than pants. What is it about trousers, jeans, and even their friskier cousin—shorts!—that boggles the mind and scrambles the senses? We wear them everyday, we all own countless pairs, and yet no one can seem to come to any consensus about how they should actually fit or explain why so many people’s pants just look plain bad.
It’s even harder to make sense of the current pants moment in this polarized era of style, where trends churn ever faster by the second, and you’re as likely to come across as many proponents of the big pants agenda as you are true believers in the skinny jeans renaissance in your local creative-director-swarmed coffee shop.
Well, to paraphrase Christopher Walken’s fictional cowbell-appreciating music producer Bruce Dickinson on Saturday Night Live: We all put our pants on the same way, one leg at a time…except, once some people’s pants are on, they actually look cool.
Here, we present an unranked list of 10 of the most important pants trends of 2024, as worn by some of our favorite famous pants-wearers. Scroll on to see where the dice landed, and hey—maybe we’ll all get lucky and finally find the perfect and correct pair of pants in 2025.
Crispy center-creased 501s
