Photograph courtesy of Doug Mills/The New York Times. Could it be that the lasting impact of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show will be … the return of bell bottoms?
At halftime of a fairly dull game (unless, well, you’re an Eagles fan), the rapper materialized onstage, flanked by dancers in monotonal outfits of either blue, red or white, dressed in clothes that clearly repped team Lamar.
His varsity jacket, custom-made by Martine Rose, a British designer known for her witty and warped sportswear, was coated with patches to please the Lamarologists in the Superdome. The front read “Gloria,” seemingly a reference to the last song on his latest album “GNX.” The back had a “pgLang” insignia, the creative agency Mr. Lamar co-runs with Dave Free.
There were other delectable elements to his outfit: a tilted fitted cap with a feather brooch pinned on the side, as well as a conspicuous “a” chain that some online took to be a head nod to the villainous “A Minor” line in Lamar’s Grammy-gathering “Not Like Us” — a line that the stadium hollered in unison at the appointed time. (Others offered that the “a” could be some sort of nod to pgLang, though it also looked a little like the Amazon logo.)
But the pièce de résistance, the item that people started texting me about, oh, two minutes into his performance, were those jeans. They were slender at the top but flared at the hem, pooling around Lamar’s black-and-white sneakers. (The brand of these beguiling jeans was not immediately clear. For several years Lamar has been styled by Taylor McNeil.)
Their bleachy blue wash was reminiscent of something you’d find at the Gap in 2000. Whether this is positive or negative depends on who you ask. As does the matter of whether they were more boot-cut or bell-bottomed. (I’d lean toward calling them Woodstock-tinged bell-bottoms. The flare was pretty flarey.) Some online questioned if Lamar had pilfered their moms’ jeans. For my generation, this cut calls to mind Britney Spears and Baby Phat. If you’re older, your touchstone may be Sonny and Cher.
For the Super Bowl’s enormous audience, Lamar’s jeans provided a snapshot into how broad and bizarre the denim market has become. We have trompe l’oeil jeans, jeans with legs the size of a playground slide (Mustard, Lamar’s producer, who joined late in the set, was wearing a pair of those) and jeans with crystals stamped into them. There is no <em>dominant </em>trend in denim right now. If you want it, you can find it. And Lamar’s bell-bottoms are timid compared to some of the hole-riddled monstrosities you can find.
I am not the first to note that, for men at least, the jean-width preferences have been inverted in the past half decade or so. It’s frat bros and conservative politicians who now wear the slim jeans. The stylistically undaunted? They’re in denim parachute pants and Shaggy Rogers flares.
It’s only right that Lamar, an intrepid dresser if there ever was one, would be backing bell-bottoms on television’s largest stage. This man just wore a Canadian tuxedo to the Grammys. He’s attended Chanel fashion shows in head-to-toe Chanel.
And if Lamar, who reigns over the rap world at the moment, can trickle some of the influence into fashion, we may have to start getting familiar with the flare again.
