5 'Fit Friday 10/16/20

Special Aidan's Pants Edition

This week, the algorithm embedded in the brainstems of the fine craftspeople at Skatelier went haywire and had some malfunctions. We wanted to mention an Aidan Mackey ‘fit as one of the 5, but we got on some Artist’s Way-type shit (thanks Andy) and ended up letting the Great Creator’s energy flow through us as we performed a medium-depth dive into the homie’s patched pants. Unfortunately, this put the other kits on the back burner and the coverage here is pretty lopsided. Burn through the other ‘fits real quick and then read on for a recap of our journey to obtain answers about Aidan’s pants.

The team at Skatelier love a full-tonal ‘fit. Tom Penny jumps up out the rust mines in full burnt orange regalia in the early 90s. Maybe Radlands? All Black Chukka Boots?

This is Julien Stranger dressed up as the polar opposite of an Anti-Hero type of guy. Cosplaying as someone he detests or whatever. It’s actually a pretty solid rich old white guy kit with a heavy ivy lean. Cable knit with the fat roll-neck under a sueded sports jacket? Light wash, lived-in denim with the penny loafers? He probably found all this stuff at Goodwill and decided to have fun with a photo.

Speaking of denims and loafers, here’s a shot of uh…Pablo Picasso. A generous cut and diesel cuffs on the jeans do a good job of showing off the socks. We’ve also got a nicely patterned short sleeve BD and some kind of timepiece. There’s some bonus styles to be found in the background here as well.

There will probably be a newsletter dedicated to Lady White Co at some point. They manage to snag some of skateboarding’s underground cult heroes for the lookbooks. Pat Franklin is draped in USA-sourced cotton jersey here. We’re huge fans of the Split Crew Cardigan they were doing for a while. The impracticality of the piece makes it the epitome of ~California Cool~. No pockets, hard to layer, bad on a windy day, no closure…but also extremely comfortable. We wish they still had them in the line.

Alright, back to Aidan Mackey’s weird pants. After the 2008 recession, the heritage thing took off (clothes made with traditional methods, “cost per wear”, Red Wing moc-toes in office settings, etc, etc) and the crew at Skatelier believes that a new-yet-similar version of this dynamic is upon us now. We’ll save the full #SecondWaveHeritage discussion for another time, but one aspect of this movement will be personal customization/repair of otherwise mundane, standard-issue garments. We’d imagine that someone who eats shit as hard and (apparently) often as Aidan would run through an average of like 4 pairs of Dickies a month, so the fact that he made a single pair last through multiple video parts is no small feat. His decision to continually repair/modify the same cheap pair of pants despite his access to an endless stream of free Supreme gear falls right in line with the spirit of #SecondWaveHeritage.

Between Kevin Rodrigues and Aidan, the new FA/Hockey video should have been a visual feast for pants enthusiasts. There’s no end to the experimentation with paint splatters, varying inseam lengths, graphics, materials, and yes: patches. Unfortunately, the annoying filter they used on the footage obscures many of the important trou-related details that the pants crowd would usually be eagerly soaking in. Our team of hardworking artisans put all other projects on hold and spent hours studying this thing like the Zapruder film in hopes of finding answers. After a sleepless night, the sun started to creep through the windows of our humble workshop and our minds started to bend to the point where, through burning eyes, the patches on Aidan’s pants started to look more like bacterial growth in a Petri dish than what was presumably a bunch of obscure hardcore band logos. As our synapses struggled to fire off the neurochemicals to continue, we made jokes about how the shitty filter made the patches look like those PET scans that show brain activity. We needed a break!

After a bit of rest, our team reconvened and someone had the bright idea to revisit Supreme’s 2019 video, Candyland. It was one of those “Aha” moments; these pants had obviously been around a while and Strobeck’s zoom would surely provide the closure we were seeking. We scrubbed through to the shared Kadow/Mackey part where they skate to Mike Mcdermott’s Supper’s Ready song and hit play. What came next was truly surprising. We paused on some of the close-ups to discover that the majority of the patches were…dinosaurs. DINOSAURS!? Sure there are some band patches (The Offspring?) and stuff in the mix, but this dude has been walking around for the past few years in a pair of pants with like 10 dinosaur patches on them. After the initial shock wore off we all agreed that we were actually really psyched about these pants!

When viewing and comparing these two video parts, the evolution of the pants reveals the chronology of the clips. We see the first patch appear near one of the pockets, cuffed hems become cut, holes grow and are repaired, he adds a stegosaur here and a T-rex over there…

While likely not a conscious critique of consumer culture, Aidan’s weird dinosaur pants are a good reminder of the lengths to which even a basic garment can be made-to-last, personalized, and appreciated. Perhaps we should all take a second look at our pants drawer to see if some of the pairs may have more gas in the tank before setting our sights towards more luxurious materials, thicker cuffs, or wider hemlines.

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PS We didn’t exactly talk about a specific Aidan Mackey outfit but it is worth mentioning that we enjoy the fact that he goes for the “classic” Vans over the “pro” varietal. Switching out white laces for black on Authentics or going laceless altogether is also a bonus.

PPS It is very possible that he has multiple pairs of grey, patch-covered pants but that was a conspiracy theory we didn’t have time to dig into.