What pants are in style now? You won’t like the answer.

We have recently crossed some sort of undeniable threshold, a point of no return in pants-wearing: An Event Horizon of pants

Author of the article:

Washington Post

Maura Judkis

Published May 02, 2026  •  Last updated 2 minutes ago  •  5 minute read

Photo by Getty Images

If you want to look cool right now, you need to be wearing barrel-leg jeans. You need to buy some capri pants. You obviously need wrap pants – what do you mean you haven’t heard of wrap pants? Surely you have purchased your balloon pants – “Bold, fluid, and, as it turns out, the perfect transitional piece,” according to Harper’s Bazaar – by now. Wide leg jeans are in. Boot-cut jeans are in. Low-rise jeans are in. Skinny jeans are (back) in. Track pants. Culottes. Pleated linen trousers. Silky satin pyjama pants. Skirt-overlay trousers. Cargo pants. Sweatpant jeans.

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We have recently crossed some sort of undeniable threshold, a point of no return in pants-wearing: An Event Horizon of pants. Seemingly, all pants are in style, which, conversely, means no pants are in style. (Also, literally, pantslessness is in style, according to the no-pants trend seen on runways and red carpets.) We have achieved pants singularity.

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And, particularly for millennial women, who are experiencing their pants-shape cycle Saturn Return – that would be the full multi-decade trend rotation from wide to skinny to wide again – it’s a deeply confusing time to have legs that one must clothe.

“I always say, like, you can spot a group of 40-year-old women if you just look down and they’re all wearing different ill-fitted jeans, because we don’t know what to do,” says comedian Jessica Keenan. “If you go to a store, every single style is there.”

Keenan knows that low-rise wide leg pants are in, but, ugh, who wants to do that again? Skinny jeans – on their way back in according to fashion insiders – are “basically leggings” and “don’t look good on us,” she says. Balloon pants are “ridiculous.” And then there’s barrel pants – the rounded silhouette that screams 2026 it girl, but also makes some wearers look like a fashionable-but-sickly Victorian orphan with rickets, or an extremely chic rodeo clown.

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The problem, as Keenan has joked in her comedy sets, is that a generation used to know how to choose a pants style. Think bell-bottoms for the ’70s, tapered acid-washed jeans for the ’80s, low-rise boot cut for the Y2K years, super skinny for the 2010s.

“We were wrong, but we picked,” says Keenan. “Gen Z didn’t pick.” Which is why billowing clown pants and pleated culottes are suddenly “the cool girl bottoms everyone is wearing this spring,” according to Who What Wear.

Cool girls have been wearing pants for over a thousand years in Asia, and a small number of 18th-century European cool girls began to adopt them after seeing Turkish women’s attire. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu travelled to Constantinople in 1716 with her husband, the British ambassador, and wrote that she wore a “pair of drawers, very full that reach to my shoes, and conceal the legs more modestly than your petticoats.”

Those would be the balloon pants that are one of the biggest trends 310 years later.

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Bloomers, another style associated with early American pants-wearing women, are also back in stores. The style was named after women’s rights advocate Amelia Bloomer. Sara Catterall, author of “Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon,” says that Bloomer actually “had a lot of mean things to say about the fashion industry.” She chose to wear pants for her health – no overheating from heavy petticoats or restricted breathing from tight laces – not for style. “So she used the fame of the pants to promote her other causes, but it wasn’t a fashion thing for her,” says Catterall.

You can buy them right now for $98 at Free People.

In the era of first-wave feminism, “when pants for women were becoming more acceptable in more places and a newer thing, the market was still kind of feeling things out,” says fashion historian Sonya Abrego, so there was a lot of variability then, too – from harem pants by French designer Paul Poiret to specialized trousers for horseback riding and bicycling. The “Rational Dress” movement urged women to dress for comfort. But it still trended toward wider silhouettes for modesty. The advent of synthetic fabrics, along with the loosening of norms later in the century brought about sleeker, skinnier silhouettes.

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Manufacturing and the trend cycle have since accelerated. Back when there were seasonal collections and retailers had to place orders months out, it may have behooved them to put all their eggs in, say, the low-rise boot-cut basket. But now, fast fashion can bring garments to market in a matter of days, and influencers can make a pair of pants go viral. The algorithm doesn’t care whether those pants are good, bad or bizarre – just that people are reacting to them.

“Social media has decentralized trend authority, allowing multiple fits – from low-rise baggy to capris to short shorts – to gain traction simultaneously,” says Laura Yiannakou, womenswear senior strategist for trend forecasting agency WGSN, in an email. “Sculptural shapes such as balloon and barrel pants also perform strongly in visual environments.”

The convergence of all of these factors seemingly has retailers wondering: Why not just offer … all the pants?

Manufacturing all the pants is, of course, terrible for the environment, and buying all the pants has opened within us an unfillable fast-fashion instant gratification hole. And yet.

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“I bought so many. I have so many styles of jeans,” says Keenan. “I have all of the jeans, and none of them look good.”

Or maybe … all of them do?

“Personally, I think it’s great that there’s not one dominant silhouette,” says Abrego, “because it allows people to have more choice and feel less boxed in by what’s more normative.”

Who cares about what’s flattering when pants are – for the first time in a long time – comfortable? Balloon pants are “like elevated sweatpants,” says influencer Jillian Stucker. Track pants – we’re wearing them with button-down shirts these days, apparently – are “cooler than leggings,” according to Who What Wear. Besides: Sweatpant jeans! The Rational Dress movement could never have conceived of such wonders.

And rounder pants silhouettes reaching the mainstream means that people who want to get really weird have carte blanche. Pants have become “tools for proportion and layering, with wide and slim shapes working in tandem to create contrast, versatility and newness,” says Yiannakou.

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Influencer Caroline Vazzana wore literal square pants – like the kind SpongeBob would sport if he were a fashion girlie – to New York Fashion Week in February. (They’re by designer Ksenia Schnaider, and they cost $745.) Last year, the brand EgonLab debuted its “scarf-pants” – a single-leg denim pant with a wide swathe of cloth that wraps around the neck, like a scarf. (Jorts, meet … jarf?)

When we look back at pictures of ourselves wearing our balloon or capri or low-rise pants in 2026, we’ll think we look absurd.

But we would have thought that no matter what pants we wore, because that’s just how it goes with time and pants. Millennials have just begun to understand this. In 10 years, Gen Z will, too.

After a lot of trial and even more error, Keenan has chosen a style. She has landed on barrel jeans.

“I’m pretty sure they look ridiculous,” she says.

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