I’ve seen a lot of things in my time; trends rehashed and revived; the waist goes up, the waist goes down, and then it goes back up again; the jeans get tight, the ankles get rolled up, the jeans get baggy and the ankles get stood on; cargo pants never stay on trend long enough to buy a pair and shoe trends are unpredictable. But one thing I know for certain is this, back in my day, it wasn’t the grandpa’s who were wearing the grandpa pants, it was us, the grandchildren.
Growing up in the 2000s we witnessed a decade dominated by retrospect. From fashion to film, music to interior design, terms such as “remake”, “spoof” and “vintage” became buzzwords as the idea of “rehashing” would become the defining attribute of the period. With the decade starting off with an ode to the 1960s; becoming divided by all subcultural movements of the 1970s and uniting at the end in the edginess of the 1980s, looking back now you might get the sense that something wasn’t quite right about the 2000s. While our parents would tell us “I had that when I was a kid” they would also tell us "to wear it properly". Now more than fifteen years on from the breakthrough incarnation of the term “grandpa pant”, it is quite clear that in the decade that made “vintage” cool, we also somehow made it ugly.
Prior to this period each decade had its iconic fashion moments, many of which could be linked to music and sub-cultural movements. Like the 80s re-invented the 50s and the 90s revisited the 60s, the 2000s stepped back into the 1970s, and here is where the grandpa pant period would find its place in history.
At the time, many of our grandpas lived their formative years in the 1950s and 1960s, so in the early 2000s this new term “grandpa pant” referred to the pre-synthetic age and mid-century design. And although they may have seen their true origins in the 1990s alternative and Ska scenes, their slow release into youth culture would see the “sophisticated” scrapped for a subversive edge.
With the commercialisation of punk and alternative trends – by such acts as Green Day, No Doubt and Avril Lavigne – we were really just trying to rebel from how I parents wanted us to be. Worn oversized, off the hip, crotch around the knees and ankles gathered under the feet delivered authentic hobo-chic. This era of crude tastelessness horrified our grandparents, who feared a hopeless and desolate future likened to the chrome-sniffing Dystopia that they witnessed in the original Mad Max series.
But disregarding how our grandparents felt about the way we dressed, in a time when people only thought to wear the popular surf and skate brands (such as Billabong, Ripcurl, Quicksilver, Roxy & Volcom), the kooky op-shop find had everybody asking “where did you get that?”.
The grandpa pant was introduced as a fun substitute to denim and a less casual choice to track pants (and the period defining board shorts). However given that they were often tailored to a real-life grandpa, finding your perfect pair could be a challenge. The trick was to find them oversized so that you could wear your pants as low as Snoop Dogg wore his jeans, but look fresh like Andre 3000.
I owned my first pair in 2003. They were a beige herringbone wool which was unsurprisingly uncomfortable as it felt like I was wearing a hessian bag. But discomfort aside, I knew that they were the ones when I looked inside and saw a large yellow piss stain in the lining. “EUREKA!” I thought as if I had struck gold, “that’s the sign that these were owned by a real-life grandpa!” I wore them with my black and white check Vans and a red 70s polyester T-shirt that was the most uncomfortable polyester I think I have ever seen (I think it was made of the same kind of plastic that they used to make Star Wars figurines out of in the 1980s). Needless to say, I thought I was pretty cool (even if my grandparents thought I looked like a homeless clown).
Now after a decade of 90s infusions, the accidents made in the early 2000s are being revived and corrected. Yes the grandpa pants have come back, and this time they've returned with a surprising twist - we are finally wearing them the way they were intended! Thanks to the return of the high waist, the dapper silhouette our grandparents once adored has travelled through time with the intention of fixing the continuum. Appropriated by no sub-culture and looking great on all body-types and genders, the grandpa pant puts light on a future our grandparents may have lost hope in. I only wish my grandfather was still alive to see us correcting the mistakes of the past.
Note: Retrostar does do not own any of the photos above, they are purely for editorial purposes.