Some fashion designers use cotton. Others wool. Chad Nazam uses stuffed animals.
Mr. Nazam, 22, a bubbly Virginian who speaks as if he had just chugged three Celsius energy drinks, has built a small but swelling profile in the online fashion community by taking perfectly good jeans and sewing at least 200 stuffed animals along the pants legs.
“In fashion a lot of things are boring,” said Mr. Nazam, who runs the brand Le Rêve Nazam. His Beanie Baby-ish jeans are not. “I’m able to kind of do what I want and be a little wrecking ball in the industry.” A plush, candy-colored wrecking ball.
The $650 jeans fall somewhere between Burning Man and Build-A-Bear. Imagine contorting a Mike Kelley sculpture into streetwear. Picture wool chaps, but instead of wool, you have squishy pigs, monkeys and bears.
Mr. Nazam began selling the jeans in April, but he is not the first person to take needle to plush. The madcap Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea wore teddy bear-coated jeans in the music video for Young MC’s 1989 hit “Bust a Move.” More recently, ASAP Rocky has worn Gucci jeans with plush zoological brooches, and Swae Lee of the rap group Rae Sremmurd modeled custom Flea-inspired stuffed animal-stitched jeans in a photo shoot.
He is also not the first internety crafter to stitch mini-stuffs onto jeans. Tierra Gray, 27, a clothing designer in Las Vegas, was sewing small plush animals onto pants as far back as 2022. Her pinnacle was a fully coated pair that called for about 1,300 soft animals and which took her four months to sew by hand.
Those were the last teddy jeans Ms. Gray made. Producing them simply took too long. Her time is better spent hand-sewing teddy bears onto slippers, boots and beanies, which she sells on her Etsy page, PlanetSugaKush, for $150, $375 and $155, respectively. Those items take only an hour or two to make. She said that in the past three years, she has sold 1,500 stuffed animal-coated items.
“It’s like instant happiness,” she said of why customers like these plush creations.
Mr. Nazam said he had not seen Ms. Gray’s designs before he began selling his jeans, and he has professionalized the production of his poofy pants and made a robust business out of selling them.
The cutesy animals are hand-sewn onto the front of each pants leg by a team of sewers, including his 79-year-old grandmother. A single pair takes as many as eight hours to make and weighs, in his estimation, six or seven pounds.
Only the front are Muppetized, so you can still sit in them. In a pinch, they double as goalie pads. “You could jump on your knees and you wouldn’t feel anything,” Mr. Nazam said.
Mr. Nazam and Ms. Gray slot in with a clique of young designers who take an unvarnished and extremely online approach to making clothes. No fashion degrees, no tech-pack know-how, just thread, an Instagram account and some why-not chutzpah. No teacher or critic ever told them they couldn’t put stuffed animals on his jeans, so they just did.
“A lot of people dress the same,” Mr. Nazam said. He wants people to look at his clothes and think, “Wait, could I wear that?” He has made denim jackets spangled with lace flowers, and jeans that are as wide as a largemouth bass, though the stuffed animal jeans are his best seller.
A diverse constellation of stars have worn Le Rêve Nazam plush pants, including the wrestler Jade Cargill, the Thai actress Araya Alberta Hargate and the K-pop rapper BamBam. Their uniting characteristic? Dressing loud. (Mr. Nazam said he did not send celebrities the jeans for free.)
In late October, DK Metcalf, a wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, wore the plush pants on a game day, triggering a wave of interest from American customers.
“Everybody loves a good conversational piece, right?” said Dani Hill, a stylist in Dallas who started working with Mr. Metcalf last season.
Ms. Hill said Mr. Metcalf already had the jeans in his closet and had never worn them. She chose them for him to wear because, she said, when an athlete is coming through the tunnel and the cameras are out, “you’re looking for something that sparks the eye.”
The sculptural pants were indeed heavy, but if anyone could muscle into seven-pound trousers, it’s a football player. “He’s a tough man,” she said.
True to their celebrity co-signs, it takes a unique character to want these pants.
“Someone who’s going to buy these is not just going to Walmart,” Mr. Nazam said. They’re for concerts or sitting courtside at an NBA game. (Though we were talking in late October, Halloween did not come up.) Still, the kidcore kitschiness of the pants doesn’t appear to have limited his customer base: Mr. Nazam said he has sold hundreds of pairs in the past year or so and that demand could soon outpace his production capacity.
Validating Mr. Nazam’s assumption about where the stuffed animals surface, Jason Bitton, 35, an entrepreneur in Toronto, recently bought the jeans (after seeing a photo of Mr. Metcalf wearing them) and wore them courtside at a Toronto Raptors game. “I’m always looking for something that’s unique, pushes the envelope,” Mr. Bitton said.
Unsurprisingly, his 5-year-old daughter was thrilled by the sight of the pants. “She was asking about different ones,” Mr. Bitton said. “She was counting them at one point.”
Other fans were similarly mesmerized by Mr. Bitton’s teddy trousers. “I probably got stopped for eight or nine pictures,” he said.
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