How Sweatpants Became the Jeans of the 21st Century

American closets have been defined by their steadfast embrace of blue jeans for over a century, but have we finally reached peak denim? That’s a question keeping certain players in the fashion industry up at night as a new item looks to become the garment of the century: sweatpants.

Yes, sweatpants. Their proliferation has been anecdotally seen in all corners of the sartorial ecosystem, from social media feeds to catwalks to the press, but their rise and denim’s fall are now being reinforced by some concrete statistics. A market research report from McKinsey last year, for example, indicated that adults under 35 — fashion’s biggest consumers — are the group least interested in buying jeans now, with less than a third saying they’re likely to buy jeans as their next pants purchase. Gen Z adults, specifically, are even less interested.

In the face of this waning interest, the sales of jeans — which have always moved up and down in cycles — have broadly begun to slow: denim sales in the U.S. increased 18.8% in 2021, but grew only 6% the following year, according to a study by consulting firm Coresight Research. That’s partly because people apparently already have enough pairs, with over half of respondents saying their primary motivation for buying jeans now is just to replace a worn-out pair.

The bigger reason for the decline of jeans, the research suggests? You guessed it: “Stronger sales of…the athleisure category.”

While it’s hard to zero in specifically on sweatpant sales, the U.S. athleisure market is certainly in the ascendant, valued last year at $88 billion — the U.S. alone representing almost a third of the global market — and expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 10% for another decade. With us all ever more fitness-conscious and — in no small part thanks to pandemic-induced acceptance of remote work — comfort-focused, sweatpants are destined to upstage jeans eventually, right? Well, there’s more to consider than current sales trends.

“We’re in a new era that has embraced comfort and figured out a way to style sweats in an ‘acceptable’ manner, and there are so many more options these days,” suggests Phillip Proyce, founder of the L.A.-based sportswear brand Lady White Co. “Sweatpants will be a staple for years to come [and] they have slowly been increasing in popularity. [But while] sweatpants have carved their way into fashion history, they’ll never have the impact of jeans.”

Never say never.

Trends Come and Go, But Denim Is Forever?

The denim market is still gigantic, despite some recent faltering. Jeans now hold a sizable but gently declining 4.5% share of the overall U.S. clothing market, though it’s worth stressing that a direct comparison of the popularity of jeans versus sweatpants is hard on such an uneven playing field. As the definitive everyman (and woman and child) garment for at least 60 years, and with a history dating to the 1870s, five-pocket jeans have a huge head-start on sweatpants. You could even say they’re woven into the mythology of America.

Sweatpants may have their own historical style icons (Steve McQueen, Rocky) and their own century-old origin story, as a superior piece of sportswear design attributed to Emile Camuset, the founder of Le Coq Sportif, in the 1920s; but their consideration as something to be worn outside of the gym or the living room is a more recent product of “athleisure.” While that term might have first been used in 1979, it only found its footing maybe two decades ago.

Give it five years or so and then it will be interesting to see whether sweatpants are quite so secondary to jeans.

– Rachel Jones, fashion marketing expert and industry analyst

Perhaps the bigger, more revealing question is: can sweatpants go the distance to rival (or at least join) jeans as a wardrobe staple, year in, year out?

“Whether jeans can really be toppled exactly seems unlikely, but the broad trend seems to be that sweatpants — or some variation on them — are going to become more and more important to the way men in particular dress,” reckons Rachel Jones, senior lecturer in fashion marketing and an industry analyst at the University of Westminster, London.

“But I think these will be an evolved form of sweatpants, one that, importantly, helps move them on from the negative associations that still surround them, as jeans once had greater negative associations and still do in some quarters,” she adds. “Give it five years or so and then it will be interesting to see whether sweatpants are quite so secondary to jeans.”

The Sweatpants Effect

Sweatpants have arguably had a harder time surmounting their own negative assumptions, given their association with weekend sloppiness. Six years ago on Reddit, a user posed a question to the r/AskMen subreddit: “If you had to pick one, jeans or sweatpants and why?” The overwhelming preference for jeans inspired comments about sweatpants “looking unemployed,” being “super casual,” something “I’d never wear outside” and “hard to impress the ladies wearing.”

“Again with the sweatpants?” Jerry Seinfeld famously asks George in one episode. “You know the message you’re sending out to the world with these sweatpants? You’re telling the world: ‘I give up! I can’t compete in normal society. I’m miserable. So I might as well be comfortable.’” Eva Mendes once only half-joked that men wearing sweatpants was the number one cause for divorce.

But these are pre-pandemic criticisms. People have changed, and so have the sweatpants you can buy. New York-based image consultant Joseph Rosenfeld argues that jeans can always be dressed up, in the sense that there are now what he describes as “executive-level jeans.” So the question of whether sweatpants can challenge jeans over the long run is down to whether they can go through the same process, to “evolve,” as Jones puts it.

British menswear designer Oliver Spencer contends that the change is already here. This evolution is both upwards, with sweatpants made from luxury materials like cashmere, wool and technical blends; and sideways, with other types of pants adopting many of sweatpants’ signature details, from elastic waistbands to drawstring ties, and pairing them with more sartorial ones, from pleats to hemmed legs.

“Trousers are following [the ethos of] sweatpants in being more draped, more voluminous, more about feeling good,” Spencer insists. “This is 100% where trousers are heading.”

While he’d never expect any of his clients to wear traditional sweatpants for anything other than sport or lounging, the result of this cross-pollination is what Rosenfeld calls a sweatpant hybrid: more comfortable than jeans and, arguably, at least as smart — the kind of thing being produced at the top end by the likes of Comme des Garçons, Zegna, Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli, a long way from your Hanes or Champion apparel. Unlike jeans, this hybrid is one that fits in well with menswear’s fundamental new leaning towards deconstructed ease.

“Are these still ‘sweatpants’? Sweatpant-adjacent?” asks Rosenfeld. “Maybe it’s more pant and less sweat, but it’s still comfort-driven. Menswear is becoming much softer generally. There was kindling [for the movement] before the pandemic, but it torched every dress code relating to our understanding of what’s comfortable and, in turn, what’s acceptable in the way we dress. This is a sensibility that I think we’ll see develop.”

And perhaps faster than we expect. Some 85% of men now report a post-pandemic shift in their work attire, according to a 2023 white paper on workplace fashion from the International Workplace Group, with a breakdown in the barrier between clothes we perceive as being “for work” and those “for leisure.” While a larger percentage (74%) of respondents say they wear sweatpants at home, a whopping 51% already choose to wear them to work. Crucially, 58% say gym clothes are now deemed appropriate by their employer.

Hell, only 57% of respondents say their company even has a dress code anymore. Maybe that favorite old pair of sweatpants, now given the green light, will do just fine after all.