As a man who writes about clothes, and keeps up with changing tastes, I’ve had to consider all kinds of fashion-related anxieties. Will cropped pants make me look short? Does a yellow shirt wash me out? Should I try to pull off cargo pants (again)?
But I wasn’t anticipating this one: What is the right amount of bottom to expose to the world?
That was the question I found myself asking during the Diesel fashion show in Milan on Wednesday, which concluded with three models (two men and a woman) in jeans slung so low that they revealed a coin-slot size portion of their bum cracks. From the front, you couldn’t see what the jeans revealed, but as the models passed, the audience was treated to not quite a full moon — perhaps a one-eighth moon. To put it delicately, their upper posteriors were well groomed. I left the show wondering if the jeans come with their own personal backside barber.
The moment was a provocation, sure. But, with an item like this, how porous is the line between runway concept and retail reality? Fashion labels have tried the peekabutt pants before. In 1993, Alexander McQueen generated a lot of attention with his Bumster jeans. Mr. McQueen’s south-of-the-Equator pants are an iconic design, if one that wasn’t much worn beyond the red carpet or the runway. And it should be said that Mr. McQueen displayed them on women.
Designers have hazarded male bumsters before. In 2015, the British label Sibling presented its cheeky “bum freezer” pants on men. Last year, the French designer Ludovic de Saint Sernin created “butt cleavage” leather pants for men. Neither design seems to have ever hit stores.
For his part, the Diesel designer Glenn Martens was serious about his just-a-smidge-R-rated jeans. In a preview before the show, Mr. Martens noted that since McQueen doesn’t make bumsters anymore, he saw the white space to “bring them back.” According to a Diesel representative, the jeans will be produced.
Mr. Martens pointed out that the jeans had elasticized jockstraps inside to hold them in place. “It glues really well,” he said.
In one regard, the sight of these jeans was somewhat expected. Very low-rise pants, as any trend forecaster with access to Bella Hadid’s Instagram will tell you, are back in style among Gen Z. The day before the Diesel show, Dsquared2 presented low-rise jeans plunging well below the navel. Parts of the fashion world appear to be on … well, a race to the bottom of the bottom. With his bumsters, Mr. Martens has reasserted the outer limit.
What he has also hit on, 30-plus years after Mr. McQueen tread into the territory, is that the sight of a butt crack is one of the last bodily areas left that still has the power to scandalize audiences.
Bare chests are so common on Milan runways that one scarcely notices them anymore. (The nipple, folks, it’s been freed.) To look more specifically at men’s wear, thigh-flashing five-inch shorts have long since gone Bloomingdale’s mainstream.
But when I shared a video of the Diesel jeans with my friends, the responses ranged from “a joke” to a crisp “come on.” When I asked one if he’d consider trying them on, he replied, “Not on my list of things to do today.”
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