In menswear, bottoms are up.
Increasingly, “more men are basing their silhouette around their pants,” said Sophie Jordan, menswear buying director at online luxury site Mytheresa, which has seen sales of men’s pants grow 78 percent year over year in 2025 thus far. The category is similarly becoming more important for individual labels: In 2024, trousers accounted for 65 percent of Parisian menswear label Officine Générale’s tailoring business, which includes blazers and full suits, said Pierre Mahéo, the brand’s founder, creative director and chief executive.
It comes at a time when what’s in vogue in trousers has gone through a major shakeup. After over a decade of skinny silhouette domination, in the last three years, wider trousers are back in fashion for men. The trend is infiltrating the A list, with actors like Colman Domingo, Jacob Elordi and Paul Mescal sporting roomier trousers on international red carpets, as well as the mainstream. The number of wider men’s pant styles available at mass retailers in the US jumped 17 percent in August 2025, while skinny pants fell 47 percent during the same time, according to retail data platform Edited.
Long regarded as stuffy office attire, the wider silhouette actually offers more comfort than a straighter-leg option, which is increasingly important to men who grew accustomed to wearing sweatpants all day during the pandemic. Plus, wide-leg trousers are flattering on all body types and as stylish with a biker jacket as they are with a double-breasted blazer.
The rise of wide-leg pants — and brands’ continued iteration on the style — is just the latest evidence of how trousers are becoming more integral to how male consumers construct their individual sense of style.
“Pants have just become much more of the focal point of a man’s outfit,” Jordan said. “In the past it felt like it was more about other items and the pants were just a filler.”
Why Men Want Wider Pants
Before this current moment, it had been nearly 40 years since wider pants have been popular for men, since the late designer Giorgio Armani popularised the silhouette in the 1980s in films like “American Gigolo” and on the Oscars red carpet.
Their reign lasted through the 1990s, but in the aughts, the rise of skinny pants took hold as designers like Raf Simons, Hedi Slimane and Thom Browne presented slender options on the runway, which were quickly adopted by influential figures, like the members of the rock band The Strokes, according to Jeremy Kirkland, host of the menswear podcast Blamo. While that trend lasted through the 2010s, by the 2020s, the high-fashion, rock-and-roll take on the style had been replaced by a mundane uniform of skinny chinos and tight gingham-checked shirts, said menswear commentator Derek Guy. The skinny look’s ubiquity had menswear obsessives seeking out another option.
The swing back to wider pants is partially a sociopolitical phenomenon, too. Prominent conservatives like Matt Walsh, who evangelise traditional ideas of masculinity, are sticking to skinny pants (ironic when considering the fact that 25 years ago, they were considered a hyperfeminine style, Guy said). That’s spawned the rise of “the performative male” who rebuffs traditionally masculine stereotypes by wearing big pants while drinking matcha tea and reading Sally Rooney novels to appear more genteel to women.
Beyond social politics, wide trousers feel more accessible. Where slimmer bottoms typically flatter slender guys, wide-leg trousers accommodate a greater range of body types. They’re also easy to pair with a variety of options on top, such as an oversized sweater or a form-hugging jacket, giving men more room to play with and hone their personal style, said Tim Dessaint, an influencer who offers style advice to his 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.
“Men are more comfortable with expressing themselves and therefore they’re also more comfortable experimenting with different silhouettes, including the wider silhouettes,” Dessaint said. “It goes hand in hand with men becoming more comfortable in their own skin.”
How Brands Approach the Trend
Wide-leg pants may be starting to feel ubiquitous, but if the runway is any indication, the trend isn’t go anywhere just yet. Jonathan Anderson’s Dior menswear debut, for one, featured a bevy of oversized bottoms, as did buzzy Japanese upstart Auralee and American mainstay Todd Snyder.
The brands finding the most success with the style, though, are putting their own stamp on the trend — from offering a variety of widths to designing them in unexpected fabrics.
Parisian menswear label Husbands’ pants are all high-waisted, which gives the brand more freedom to play with leg width, said Nicolas Gabard, the company’s founder and creative director. Husbands, which is known for its 1970s, Saint Laurent-inspired made-to-measure suiting, offers styles with a more tapered leg opening to ones with a retro flare, and others that are roomy enough to envelop a shoe. The brand is broadening its trouser assortment as demand for the category skyrockets, Gabard said.
“There is just this more playful way of approaching it, so it feels a little bit more unexpected, and there are definitely menswear customers who are excited by that,” Jordan said.
But that experimentation has to align with what a brand’s customers actually want. For Officine Générale’s fall 2026 collection, the Parisian menswear brand introduced a pant called the Evans that has a 28-centimetre hem — versus a 22-centimetre hem for a straight leg style — its widest silhouette yet. But it isn’t a complete departure from other top selling styles like the brand’s Nash pants that have a 26-centimetre hem, Maheo said.
“When you make a product and then meet the audience, that’s fantastic. That’s where you succeed in doing your job,” Maheo said.
Brands are also preparing for what comes next, with an eye to men’s continued interest in trousers. Prada’s men’s runway show in June featured form-hugging bottoms over loafers; and Michael Rider also mixed in skin-tight pants in his debut collection for Celine in July. But the new normal in the near future will likely land somewhere in the middle of “not too slim and not too wide,” said Jian DeLeon, Nordstrom’s men’s fashion director.
To prepare for that moment, some are attempting to make a more timeless version of a roomier pant. The bestselling men’s pants style for basics label Alex Mill is a pleated chino with a cropped hem that is relaxed in the thigh area but tapers near the ankle, said co-founder and creative director Somsack Sikhounmuong. That look, he said, feels relevant today but wouldn’t have looked out of place in 2015 when the cuts were much slimmer.
Whichever pant shape reigns in the coming years, the current ubiquity of wide-leg trousers has pushed designers to offer a broader range of silhouettes, from slightly loose to cartoonishly oversized. That, in turn, is encouraging more men to experiment with and define their own look rather than copying and pasting a trend.
“It’s just coming back to this more modern understanding of men taking it upon themselves and being more open to realise what works for them and what makes them feel good when they wear it,” DeLeon said.