Pants Are So Over
Designers are freeing the leg and then some. Pants are so 2024, you see — come 2025, fashion says that pants are over.
What we've seen at New York and London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2025 is an evolution of the no-pants look that some celebs have been repping for the past few months but even bigger.
Bare legs are a saucy staple, something affected even in colder months as an example of daring dress. Instant sex appeal! We all know this. But the recent emphasis on pantslessness across disparate runways is a fresh glimpse of the writing upon the wall: Pants are so over.
Shame, really, because several perfect pairs of pants also appeared throughout the season, including tremendous trousers at both Burberry and Willy Chavarria, New York's resident trouser master.
But their time is now, whereas big top, no pants is the future.
The Big Shirt Little Pants look is already a no-brainer cheat code for intentionally imbalanced proportions, embraced by influencer-model celebs like Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner, and Charli XCX. Only the most daring of ordinary dressers would otherwise apply.
But what if this get-up was for everyone?
Willy, Coach, and JW Anderson sent out models clad in massive outerwear and little else, demonstrating a sort of stylistic insouciance that's as evocative as it is breezy.
And at Luar, the motif wasn't only maintained but expanded to the notion of pants as... not pants.
Here we find another evolution, wherein pants are sliced into separate but singular leg coverings or layered into a new shape, like with Off-White™'s zip-off tops that function as a sort of skirted pant-covering.
Pants aren't dying a quick death, in other words. They're slowly mutating as we evolve beyond the need for them.
Early traces of this inclination can be observed in last year's underwear as outerwear movement, which in turn created a yen for stacked bottoms that extended into 2024.
Perhaps that's more of what's going on here, actually.
The reports of pants' death may have been mildly exaggerated. It's not so much that we no longer have a need for pants — who's really gonna be dropping trou in mid-winter? — as much as the culture demands more interesting bottoms.
And, failing to find those, it will simply accept none at all.
There is no middle ground! Step into LOEWE's sublime SS25 slacks or none at all.
