How Low Can Your Pants Go?

Young men have always dressed to shock. Yet there is something strange about today's underclad bottoms.
It is a sunny day. I am sitting outside a cafe, watching the world go by. I don't yet know it, but my world is about to change. The boundaries of the possible are about to be redrawn. The instigator is a young white guy who, from a distance, looks a shade thuggish, but is otherwise utterly unremarkable. It is only as he gets closer that I realise what he has to show me.
It's his belt-line. I've seen them low before; everyone has. But this is different. This is special. From the front, at first you just think, "That's low." You also think, "That's a lot of underpant. Several inches." The subconscious scientist in you even asks, "How does that stay up?" But, as he passes by and I am treated to the rear view, I realise that I have entered a whole new world. His belt is below the buttocks. At the front, the belt appears to be resting on his penis. From there the belt slopes downwards and is pulled taut against the backs of his thighs.
Allow me to clarify. This is the outfit. Neck to waist: T-shirt. Waist to genitalia/anus: underpant. Genitalia to ankles: jeans. The notion of an undergarment has been jettisoned. The underpant is out there. The buttocks are all but open to the wind. Both cheeks. Top to bottom. For the trouser, this is truly a new low.
Five minutes after I witness this curious display, it happens again; this time it is a black guy. Two unconnected incidents, four buttocks on display in the street, shielded from view by nothing more than a thin veil of designer underpant.
Men's belts and backsides have had a close, co-operative relationship for hundreds, if not thousands, of years - the latter supported the former. Now the roles seem to be switching. If this sounds implausible, I urge men to try it. You need a baggy pair of trousers and a long belt. Seemingly against the laws of physics, the trousers will stay up. It is a little uncomfortable, since the weight of the trousers is chiefly borne by the penis, but as long as you don't attempt any sudden bursts of speed, your trousers will not fail you. Though what you have to lose if your trousers do drop is not entirely clear, since everything is already on display. Having achieved the look, I walked downstairs (which was not easy and caused some chafing) to show my wife. She was unimpressed. In fact, she laughed loudly, at length, then told me my underpants were too cheap.
One further point needs clarifying. These were not, I am sure, gay men. Though the clothes were screaming, "Look at my arse!" the manner and face of both men were saying, defiantly, "What do you think you're looking at?" Indeed, the low belt-line has been pioneered by rap musicians and urban American black culture, notorious for homophobic machismo.
You have to look at the source of this fashion to understand what is really going on. In the late 1970s and '80s, gay culture began to co-opt machismo. Bands such as the Village People dressed up as hunks while prancing like queens, and the handlebar moustache and lumberjack shirt were never the same again. Machismo was queered. Even muscles became somehow a little bit gay. Straight fear of gayness allowed gay men to dictate straight fashions. If gay men started growing moustaches, straight men sprinted for their razors. When gay men wore tight trousers, straight men swiftly adopted a baggier style.
Since the early '90s, heterosexual men have avoided tight trousers. But now, it seems, urban black culture is fighting back and reclaiming the buttocks from gays. The clothes are still baggy but, thanks to that descending belt, for the first time in 15 years the straight behind is daring to show its curves in public. The subtext of the look is, I suspect, a defiantly macho, "Look, I'm so heterosexual that I can display my arse in public without feeling gay." There is a logic at work here. If you accept the argument that conventional straight fashion is running scared from gay fashion, it follows that the most macho way you can dress is to show that you are not susceptible to that fear. In other words, the best way to show that you have no fear of gayness is to dress gay.
Some fashions trickle down to the high street from the catwalk. Others climb up to the catwalk from the street. When it comes to the low belt-line, there are two rival theories on its inception. The trickle-down theory credits Alexander McQueen's "bumster" trousers, which in the mid-'90s set the trend for a descending belt. Others trace the look to American prisons, where one of the first things that happens is your belt is taken away. Prisoners, as a result, wear their trousers low.
From here, via gangster chic, the look spread all the way to suburban "wiggas" - white men who mimic black urban culture. This is what makes the fashion so hard to interpret. When a man goes low, he could either be imitating a gay designer's haute couture, or aspiring to the condition of a con. Messages don't come more mixed.
Luke Day, fashion director of Attitude, the British gay lifestyle magazine, believes these apparent opposites can happily coexist and have done for a while. "A fashion can easily be gay and macho at the same time," he says. Gay men may have taken tight jeans to new extremes in the '80s but, at the same time, Day points out, Axl Rose was fond of strutting his stuff in white Lycra cycling shorts.
Gay culture and macho culture have one important thing in common - both groups are more interested in impressing other men than in appealing to women. And the low belt certainly doesn't appear to be a look designed to turn on women. The therapist and sex columnist Emma Gold isn't alone among women in asserting, "Men who wear their trousers like this look ridiculous. It's very unsexy and doesn't flatter a man's arse at all."
Mary Target, reader in psychoanalysis at University College London, sees the gesture as not just unsexy, but positively aggressive towards women. "Sexual display," she says, "can be to seduce or offend. This is more akin to flashing than to any kind of come-on." But the aggression, she adds, is aimed more at men. She considers it to be a challenge of the kind drunk men make at closing time, when they want a fight. The arse is displayed to provoke suggestions of homosexuality that can then be reacted to with aggressive homophobia. You show your arse, then anyone who looks can legitimately be punched. It is, then, a homophobic pseudo-gay come-on.
Jamie Collinson, manager of Big Dada, one of Britain's most successful hip-hop labels, agrees that low-slung clothes have entered the mainstream from American rap culture, but disputes that there is anything sexually ambiguous about the look. He claims that it would not even occur to the people wearing their clothes in this way that there is anything gay about this buttock display. "Hip-hop is competitive," he says, "and when it became fashionable to wear your trousers baggy and low, people just started pushing it further and further to outdo one another." He has another theory about where the fashion began - according to him, many white Americans believe that black Americans wear baggy clothes so it is easier to conceal weapons. The irony is, this patently racist assumption has caused "wiggas" to adopt the look. The white kids who do this are therefore expressing their racism and slavishly imitating black culture at the same time.
Wherever the look originated, and however you read its meaning, its popularity can be put down to the idea of rebellion. High-waisted, tailored clothes are associated with conformity. Scruffy, low-waisted trousers attempt to convey rebelliousness. The fact that older people find this fashion unappealing is the key to its appeal. Youth fashion since the '20s has been about defiance. When flappers cut their hair and revealed their legs, their parents got into, well, quite a flap. At the time, this was truly shocking: a genuine outrage. Decade by decade, young people tried to come up with new ways to define themselves by dressing in a manner that the generation before found unacceptable. Since punk, however, no one has come up with anything genuinely shocking.
Now, it seems, they have. I know this because I, personally, am shocked. For the first time in my life, I find myself on the parental side of the line. When I see an 18-year-old walk down the street with his trousers halfway down, I find myself confused. I can't say I'm offended exactly, but a voice does begin to echo around my head telling these kids to pull themselves together and change into something decent.
What is particularly timely about the low-jean look is that it offers a new form of scruffiness for a materialist, designer-obsessed age. Hip-hop fashion has always had to walk a tightrope. Rap musicians want to look both rebellious and wealthy; no other musical form has ever been so materialist. And it is not easy to look expensively scruffy. A low belt provides the answer: it is a way of wearing expensive clothes in a manner that no wealthy man would. You can say, "Look how rich I am" while also saying, "I hate rich people". There is an appalling hypocrisy at work here. The central message of contemporary rap music is that you are not a real man if you are willing to be pushed around or told what to do on any level. In other words, if you are someone's employee, you are a loser. The clothes, meanwhile, proclaim that if you are not rich, you are also a loser.
Youth culture has encouraged young people to opt out for a long time, but never before has it told them that they must defy the workplace and get rich at the same time. Today's rap stars produce not just music, but an entire stable of products, from trainers to clothes to scents. This is a musical form whose trajectory over the past two decades has been the journey from NWA's F--- Tha Police to 50 Cent's "buy my branded sneakers".
I recently spent a year on a mentoring program for "troubled" or "excluded" young people in north London. I was assigned an 18-year-old black guy, whom I met for coffee every fortnight for a year. My job was to try to help him decide what to do with his life and, theoretically, assist him in achieving it. Due to an incident with a knife, his education had ended early without him getting a single qualification.
It took us a while to be even remotely at ease with one another, but eventually affection and trust grew. Everything about his dress, mannerisms and language spoke of gangster chic defiance, as if the first thing he wanted to tell a room when he walked in was that no one was going to tell him what to do. As far as job interviews go, this is not a successful strategy: he might as well have tattooed "unemployable" on his forehead. He had bought into a culture that insisted salaried work was beneath him, yet at the same time filled him with a passionate love of money or, more specifically, luxury goods. His dream was to be a musician. This was the only aspect of his life into which he put any real effort, and I hope he makes it.
There must be millions of other young men like him, white and black, throughout Europe and the US. Too naive to see through the hypocrisy of rich, pampered musicians peddling the myth that it's uncool to work, or even to behave as if you might want to work, they are falling for a terrible lie.
The low belt is obviously not the cause of this cultural malaise, but it can perhaps be read as its key icon. If everyone can see your underwear and a significant portion of your backside, you are telling the world that there is no employer breathing down your neck, dictating what you wear. You are also saying that you don't even want a job.
Capitalism, like the flu virus, constantly mutates to win. Its goal is simply to make us spend and it has now found a way to make young people rebel by spending more, not less. For anyone brought up when rebellion meant questioning and rejecting the commercial and the overtly capitalistic, this pseudo-rebellion seems tawdry and tragic. On the other hand, perhaps this is what makes it authentic.
The primary job of rebellion, after all, is to upset the parents. The very fact that thirty- and fortysomethings are offended by this look is a sign that youth fashion is still doing its job. And the more we hate it, the more likely we are to be sending out another young man in search of 100cm-waist jeans and a 200cm belt.
from The Sydney Morning Herald