Last month, my brother texted me a photo of some pants he was thinking about buying. They were cargo pants. Olive green. Six pockets. His text beneath it read only “these back?” Eleven characters, five of which were spaces. Ten years of essentially saying nothing to each other about clothes shared between those two messages and this is the thunk that jars us back to attention.
I spent some time reading that text before sending a reply because the truthful answer was “kind of, sort of, it depends,” and that’s difficult to text.
I want to have words with whoever I was circa 2011 that helped unload an entire shelf of cargo pants at Old Navy clearance prices and told an actual customer that they were “done, this time for good.” Said that. To a person shopping in the store. With conviction and a straight face. That me was very sure of himself and very wrong, and I think of him every time I see someone under 30 wearing a pair that weren’t hand-me-downs and he was around in elementary school.
Because the thing no one selling you a hot take one way or the other on this wants to address is that cargo pants didn’t actually go away. What went away was one kind of cargo pant. The six-pocketed, toolbox fronted, drop-crotch Mountain Years originals. Those saw their day, flew away, and we should run them out of town if they ever come back. Returning this summer are cargo pants that resemble their forebearers, but came from very different genealogical branches, and where the confusion comes into play is asking “are cargo pants back?” like it’s referring to one style that can be definitively answered yes or no when it’s actually two styles wearing the same name tag.
What actually changed, and no it’s not the pockets
The pockets are the focus of a lot of opinions on this because, well, they’re the easy thing to notice. But the pockets themselves aren’t what defines whether a pair of cargo pants look like they belong now or like Halloween got hired to work at your local off-price store. It’s the leg. My brother’s texted photo looked like they went straight through the thigh before having some slack at the ankle. Flipped backward is what’s selling right now, what’s working with everything else that men’s wear cares about these days. If they taper down through the leg even slightly, preferably with the knees bent a bit so they don’t widen back out like bell bottoms, the pockets sit on your thigh in a way that looks intentional rather than just like they made it there and managed not to fall down.
I picked up a pair for myself last year from a smaller company I’ll pretend I discovered through diligent research when my nephew mentioned them. But what set them apart wasn’t who made them, it was that they were made with a cotton twill that had weight to it but was far removed from the big canvas vibe of the originals I used to peddle by bulk. I wore them to a cookout last July. Sat in a folding chair for four hours. Got barbecue sauce spilled directly onto the thigh pocket and it came out after washing with detergent but nothing obscure. That might not sound like much but that’s cartel. The ones from ten years ago would’ve hung that stain for life.
The part that isn’t changing though, and this is what every article declares when they pop up screaming “cargo pants are back!” fails to mention is you still need to have enough room through the hip and thigh that putting items in the pockets doesn’t make the pockets look like they’re going to burst when loaded. A cargo pant with one flat pocket yelling at the other five isn’t a cargo pant, it’s a vestigial dangler pretending to be both cargo pants and a statement piece at once and I’ve been to more than one of these marketed as “modern takes” this year alone that eliminated so much room from the pant that they might as well rip that stitch line off altogether. If you can’t put a paperback book into any of the pockets without it bulging, you fell for the idea without the function and we do not speak about that level of purchase.
The part where I’m probably talking myself out of being right about being wrong
I wrote off the entire trend as rerun season about halfway through reading the headline on previewing them on a display at the store I worked at last summer, which considering how many trends I’ve watched recycle in my time with Menswear could very well be more indication of how jaded I’ve become than it is about the legitimacy of cargo pants having swirled back into the Earth’s atmosphere. But thinking on it more, there’s evolution at work here.
The leg shape gives it away. Nobody was cutting their cargo pants with a taper in 2008 when this was a genuinely relevant garment and sales were good. The fabrics have changed, overwhelmingly moving toward some kind of cotton blend that stretches instead of a solid heavyweight fabric.
The fit through the thigh still needs to have room so the pockets don’t look stressed when put to use, but there’s enough innovation being put into how these are cut that I’m actually excited to see menswear buyers playing around with them again. Cargo pants are back in a way that slang terms become relevant again. We all know the word, we understand the basics of what it is, but they’re being put to use in such a way that bringing up the old versions will make you sound like your underwear is from a bygone era. Get them tapered, get them cut from something that moves with your body instead of restricting it, and actually use the pockets as something other than a place to hold pens. Avoid anything that looks like it was purchased directly off a sale rack at Hollister in 2004 because it was and there have been zero strides made in that department since.
Incidentally, my brother still hasn’t responded to my text about whether he ended up buying those pants. Knowing him, he already did and will say nothing until he sees if I notice.
Reg spent thirty years buying for a menswear shop floor in Sheffield before it closed. He writes about clothes built to last, compares every new buy with something he’s owned for twenty years, and has made most of the expensive mistakes already.
