Is Robert Pattinson Bringing Back Skinny Jeans?

Eileen Cartter
·3 min read

ENAV, JOLA/Backgrid

Even through the last several years, as Hollywood’s leading men became progressively preoccupied with fashion, Robert Pattinson is still a sartorial hobgoblin. While he might throw on a hunky-goth ensemble for a movie premiere or a tweed skirt if he’s contractually obligated to sit front row at a Dior show (he’s been the face of Dior Homme since 2013), the actor’s day-to-day wardrobe is trollishly normal, increasingly daddish, and perhaps even intentionally detached. He tends to emit a “when they go high, we go low” attitude towards fashion trends: If the fellas are clamoring for five-inch inseams, RPatz is wearing goofily baggy cargo shorts.

While visiting an upmarket cafe-grocery in Los Angeles this week, Pattinson wore what most would consider to be an unremarkable outfit: a tan corduroy jacket, a graphic T-shirt, and jeans, which he accessorized with a logoless trucker hat and Adidas trainers. (Even RPatz’s sneaker preferences skew low-key.) But for those who have been eyeing the proverbial weathervane to catch even the slightest shifts in the pants-trend forecast, you may notice how closely the hems of RPatz’s pants hew to his ankles—how directly the denim fabric skims the actor’s calves and thighs. Like seeing a long-lost friend (or foe), could they be…a pair of true slim-fit jeans?

To be sure, an isolated instance of Robert Pattinson taking himself out to lunch in a pair of skinny-ish jeans does not a reverse-trend make. More realistically, the familiar sight of a 37-year-old man in slim-fit denim feels like an affirmation that most men who came of age in the tapered-pants era (which is to say: guys currently in their 30s and 40s) never totally stopped wearing them to begin with.

Robert Pattinson in 2009, wearing an outfit he might still wear today.

Celebrity Sightings In New York - June 15, 2009

Robert Pattinson in 2009, wearing an outfit he might still wear today.
James Devaney

In a recent New York Times Magazine article about the return of big pants, writer Jonah Weiner noted how, for the better part of the 21st century, slim-fit pants felt like “a structural fact of existence”—an intrinsically constrictive silhouette that became “common currency across generations, demographics and body types.” The dimming of the tapered-leg trouser as the premiere menswear silhouette dipped significantly around 2020, in alignment with the broader soft-clothes implications of pandemic lockdown; jeans became ampler, slouchier, and more flared. But now, Weiner conceded, “some people think skinny is bound to make a swift comeback—slim pants were surprisingly well-represented on designer runways in January.”

It’s likely that Pattinson’s slim jeans, rather than being a bellwether for a full-on skinny-fit revival, are an indication that whatever style of pants was cool when you were 25 will remain cool to you forever. Generations from now, we may well see 35-year-old Zoomers stubbornly stepping out in mile-wide denim even as their Gen Alpha counterparts have fully embraced some unforeseeably diabolical new form of skin-tight dungarees.

Originally Appeared on GQ

More Great Style Stories From GQ