Covering Fashion & Pants Became Impossible Once Skaters Began Dressing Like Fashion Icon Tim Duncan

We here at QS HQ are often suggested topics beyond the typical “post my video.” One of the most common suggestions is a story about pants. Lots of suggestions for stories about pants.

We did a big story about pants back in the fall of 2020, when Polar Big Boys and their descendants had a monocultural hold on skateboarders’ legs. One commenter deemed it a watershed moment for QS content. At the time, our collective perception of the pantscycle looked something like this:

But at that moment during peak-COVID, when interactions with human nature were at a minimum, many considered this inaccurate.

“Nah,” they said. “Tight pants are never coming back.”

The world had experienced the “end of history” in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and at the start of the 2020s, we had [allegedly] arrived at the end of pants with the collapse of skinnies. It was a unipolar world, no longer bound to the hesh v.s. fresh binary.

Imagine being that naive?

In recent weeks, we have been inundated with requests for an update of that “watershed” pants piece — to explain how the hell slim pants are back on the legs of eminent former baggy pants evangelists. It is not so much that pants ended, it is more that pants exploded.

Fashion is a nebulous blob; calling it a cycle was always easier for our baby brains to process. The comfortable hegemony incited by milestones like “Dylan,” “cherry,” the Nike SB Janoski, and Big Boys seems like a figment of the pre-2020 world. The pants “cycle” now looks like this:

So why not write about recent upheavals in the world of pants? Why not use these high-flying ecstatic days of June to do on-the-ground research for a piece that would arrive on our front page in the dog days of summer? Why don’t we do #TRENDWATCH pieces all that much anymore?

Because last year, we had an internal meeting and decided that ever since some of our brightest and most talented colleagues started dressing like Tim Duncan, that writing about pants — or any other clothing item, for that matter — was kinda impossible. Tap the images.

Max Wasungu via Dime’s GLORY video

Ville Wester via Palace’s More Highly Defined video

Trung Nguyen via Late Nite Stars’ O video

Zak Anders via Late Nite Stars’ O video

Coles Bailey via Instagram

Ok, but why five-time NBA Champion, San Antonio Spurs power forward Tim Duncan?

Because — and we’ll get to why we always disagreed with this — he was renown for a sort of “anti-style” in his off-court fits. In short, people thought he dressed bad.

There was an entire micro-economy of 2010s internet content clowning Tim Duncan’s outfits. Complex hosted a “swagless retrospective.” The Onion had an article about how he had an endorsement deal with Florsheim Shoes. Upon his 2016 retirement, GQ chastised him for “wearing the same thing for 20 years.” Sports Illustrated reported on his “fashion crimes.”

Much like how a legion of boys in Big Boys could not imagine a different future once they became men, these shortsighted writers were unprepared for the fact that we would one day live in a world where Tim Duncan is acknowledged as the fashion god that he always was. We, of course, were never so stubborn as to insist that one type of pant would dominate until time’s end. We knew anything was possible, but Duncan’s vengeance was certainly not on our bingo card.

And be honest: the dude looks sick there. This was an era when other NBA players of similar height and stature dressed like this, and 2010s sports/fashion media spent their time roasting Timmy?

(Not excited about the prospect of this Tyson Chandler fit making it onto skaters in 2031, tbh. Nor are we dumb enough to rule out the possibility. After all, he’s basically dressed like Chad Muska ten years ago.)

And what does this have to do with anything? Just that during the aforementioned internal meeting, we realized that if some of today’s greatest skaters — Coles, Max, Zak, Trung, Ville above, but others as well — can vindicate the most maligned style legend of this century and look sick while doing so, then we have no business trying to “forecast” what’s going to “happen” in “fashion.” Because, like, who saw that coming? The days of a #TRENDWATCH fitting into a neat box are behind us. Anyone claiming to be an expert is full of shit.

If anything, it is an invite to shake the rigidities hiding in our psyches. The thing that will “never” work. The trend that will “never” come back. The only “never” in life is: never doubt a guy who never missed the playoffs in his 19-year career. (For context, Lebron missed five, Kobe missed four, and Jordan missed two during both seasons that he played for the Wizards.)

Even if it’s as far-fetched as him returning to the fold as 2020s skater fashion muse to render all writing about pants obsolete ;)

[Was like 91% sure there was an Emile Laurent fit that matched this identically, but couldn’t find it, or it maybe doesn’t exist. Spiritually, it’s there.]