I’m happy to take requests. Reader LF wanted to know about kids who wear their pants down low.
Young men wearing jeans that sag beneath their hips fascinate me. I am easily fascinated but especially so by people who do things that are unhealthy with no pay off. Some unhealthy behaviors at least have a short term benefit but walking with your pants falling off seems nothing short of dumb.
The style may have originated from prison culture where you are not allowed a belt in jail, through it has clearly crossed cultural lines into the mainstream world. A lot of kids with their underwear high and their pants down low because that’s the way they roll.
I have spent a lot of time watching boys wearing their pants this way and it boggles my mind because it strikes me that we are watching the birth of a bow-legged hip hop generation. If your pants are falling off the only way to keep them on is to walk your knees and legs out to the side with each step. Your body might keep going straight ahead but your knee which is designed to move in a line with the hip and ankle (with a tiny movement inwards towards your other knee), is going to move to the outside of your hip in order to keep your pants on.
Oh my. This way of walking enforces all the patterns that I hope people won’t have, and it does so in an extreme fashion. When the knees pull out sideways the pelvis tucks under, the piriformis muscle shortens and the psoas leaves the operational picture. The Iliotibial band and the tensor fascia latae muscle become ridiculously tight from shortening with ever more bow-legged steps.
This fashion choice has an impact through the whole body but the main question I have is what makes someone thinks it looks good rather than silly.
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