Less than three weeks into the March 2020 lockdowns in New York City, my boyfriend turned to me with a revelation he was having while in the snug living room that had become our co-working space, wine bar and prison chamber.
A finance lawyer who used to wear suits, he lately had found himself toiling in a series of baggy sweatpants and sweaters. (No judgment: I wore the same crusty, forest-green hoodie and gray sweats for over three days straight.) As we prepared to throw on some jeans to head to the grocery store, he told me he couldn’t remember the last time he had put on a pair of “hard pants.”
I shared his utterance on Twitter, the site on which I have wasted much of my life, and “hard pants” went viral. Dictionary.com even credited us with popularizing the term, although it’s been around in some form since at least 2009. It was probably my greatest cultural contribution to the pandemic — it may prove to be the most influential piece of writing I produce in my career.
Three years on, while I have mostly stopped wearing masks, my soft clothes remain. All the pieces I gravitate toward feel more … casual. If a set of pants has an elastic waistband, I’m sold. On an ideal day, you shouldn’t be able to tell if I’m going to the club or to my couch. Think airport chic.
I don’t think this makes me or my fellow softies slobs. We haven’t given up, per se. We’ve merely let go of what was previously expected of us. If anything, it takes a certain grizzled hardness to emerge from the chaos of Covid and embrace softness. It feels liberating, both for my spirit and for my legs.
The divider between formal and informal spaces, between the professional and the unprofessional, has become as thin and faint as the line on a Covid test. I spent much of the past few years looking at my colleagues’ bedrooms and seeing their toddlers crash Zoom calls — something that was once so unimaginable that when it happened in 2017 on the BBC it became international news.
We had no choice but to allow others into our private spaces. And as days turned to months turned to years, any pretense of formality went out the window. Please recall that someone once seemingly flushed a toilet during audio oral arguments for the Supreme Court — whose members, it should be pointed out, have been enjoying loosefitting robes for over two centuries.