And pastel pink jeans with little zips up the
ankles. And big plastic earrings. Fingerless gloves. And those g-string
leotards worn outside my leggings to do aerobics in the 80s. In fact,
most things I wore in the 80s were resolutely criminal.
But was I arrested? I was not. The same cannot be said for young,
mostly black men in America who will soon be fined or thrown in jail
for their fashion choices. Seriously.
There is a particular look, popular among a certain tribe of young
hip-hop loving males, called “sagging”. It involves wearing your baggy
pants low. Not just hipster-low but actually underneath your bottom,
exposing your boxer shorts.
Truth be told, I’m not at all sure how you pull this off. To have your
pants hover below your buttocks without slipping down around your
ankles? Well, that is quite a feat. Especially given that belts are not
involved. And how do you walk? Sadly, I have not had the chance to pose
any of these probing questions to a sagger because I’ve never seen one
in person. Only photos.
Remember those early 90s Calvin Klein ads with Marky Mark and an emerging waif called Kate Moss? That was possibly our first introduction to the idea of men’s underwear being visible in a sexy way (as opposed to a builders’ crack way) and it inspired a rush of men’s underwear with branded elastic waistbands. Sagging is a bit like this look, if Calvin and Marky had been taking serious amounts of hallucinogenic drugs before the photo shoot.
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I live in America, so I have seen plenty of saggy pants. They can't put their legs too close together or the pants will fall down, so they have to sort of tip back and forth with their legs constantly spread, like penguins. Some guys even walk with one hand holding up the pants, like Victorian ladies holding up their gowns to go up and down stairs. One of my good friends is a black woman, and she absolutely hates saggy pants to the point of loudly and publicly berating guys who hit on her while wearing them: "You are not my people! You don't respect yourself, how are you ever going to respect a woman!" She argues that the point of pants is to cover your butt, and if they don't do that, they're just leg-warmers.
That should be "fashion offences".
As for sagging, check out the women and the odd token man who work for the Commonwealth Department of Health! Health? What a joke!
A friend of mine who works for elevator maintenance contractors told me that every one of the lifts in Health's buildings were upgraded to stronger, titanium based cables to carry the extra weight.