Look of the Week: Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl pants signal the return of flares
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This year’s Super Bowl halftime show was hardly a fashion extravaganza, with headliner Kendrick Lamar keeping things simple in a backwards cap and motorbike-style varsity jacket, which he kept on throughout.
And without the costume-change roulette we’ve come to expect of halftime shows, the internet fixated on one item in particular: his jeans.
While not quite the bell-bottoms of decades past (the 1970s and the 2000s, specifically), the Compton-born rapper’s washed denim pants flared out at the knee and dragged beneath his heels along the stage at Caesars Superdrome in New Orleans. His silhouette stood in stark contrast to that of record producer Mustard, who made a brief cameo in a pair of outsized jeans straight from the West Coast hip-hop playbook.
Opinions were, as ever, divided on social media. Some users described Lamar’s flares as “women’s jeans” and “Hannah Montana pants,” earning him comparisons to everyone from Jennifer Aniston to country singer Lainey Wilson. Others joked that their moms were looking for a similar pair or that they nodded to millennials, for whom flares were a teenage staple.
But those suggesting his style was outdated, or gender-inappropriate, may not have been paying attention to the recent resurgence of flares — in both womenswear and menswear. After all, Lamar’s jeans were designed by one of the most influential figures in modern fashion, Celine’s former creative director Hedi Slimane, before he departed the French label in October.
