#RAWTHOUGHTS 7.20.26: Pant-ing and moaning
surprisingly, i'm not much of a david lynch guy. not out of animosity or anything i just never got around to watching a lot of his work. i liked blue velvet and lost highway, i enjoyed the season and a half of twin peaks i saw and i liked him as a public figure that felt kinship with the moon and made videos where he tried to pronounce his fan's usernames with their panties in his mouth but he hasn't really come up in my backlog of stuff i plan on watching.
he was right about pants though.
some time last week a screenshot of an interview he did with gq made the rounds where he laments his lifelong struggle to find a truly good pair of pants. i sympathize. god, i sympathize. and he was only five ten! im six three and i'm kinda cheeked up!
so looking at my wardrobe as of july 2026... right now i don't think I have any pants that cost me more than seventy five dollars. that probably holds me back, especially with jeans but i've never really had a good history with expensive pants. 2007 i bought a pair of edwins for 290 and they got holes in them seven months in. matter of fact same thing happened with the g stars i bought in 05.
but right now i have two pairs of carhartt b01s(black and detroit brown), a pair of stan ray painter pants, a pair of stan ray carpenter pants, two pairs of uniqlo regular fit khakis i bought for a series of job interviews that didn't pan out(probably for the best because that position opened up two months later), a pair of rothco cargo fatigues in tiger camo that are kind of disappointing even though i love the pattern, a pair of shrink to fit 501s and a pair of wrangler 13mwzs, the so called "cowboy cut", which im wearing right now.
out of all of these, my favorites are the b01s, the painter pants and the cowboy cut. the carpenter pants are cool but i bought them an inseam down because the store i bought them from only carries a 32 inseam. they shrunk a bit the first time i wash them so the hem doesn't fall the same. the rise is big because they're carpenter pants but still, it's not the same.
the cowboy cuts are almost perfect, long rise, decent legs, decent pockets, no branding(i removed all of it with a seam ripper right when i got them), i even like the little lightning bolt fades that come after i wash them. i just hate the coin pocket. it's right at the waistband so if i have to do anything involving change its right at my belt and its a pain in the ass.
the b01s and painter /carpenter pants are great just for practicality. they're tough, durable, they have really useful pockets, they look good with sneakers. the b01s in particular have double knee patches so visually they're pretty interesting.
the cargos... so rothco quality wise... kind of ass. these are military "inspired", not the real thing. and not inspired like buzz rickson or one of those otaku firms where they make stitch for stitch reproductions of an m51 fishtail and sell it for nine hundred bucks. the material feels flimsy, the little waist adjustment things don't hold and they don't really seem like they're suited for any climate. if you've ever dealt with actual surplus it feels damn near bulletproof. i bought a schott navy peacoat last year that was made for a navy contract and it feels like elephant skin. these pants have less integrity than hakeem jeffries.
i think the only good i've gotten out of them is that theravada retweeted me because i said i owned the same pants(those tiger camo cargos) he was wearing in the "i smoke crack" freestyle he did.
fuck 501s.
fuck levi's in general, their main line is terrible and somehow it's damn near impossible to buy any of their good stuff in the place where capitalism happens, it's all just weird fit experiments and linen/tencell blends and all weather technology, but fuck the 501.
i like the idea of the 501. a "regular fit", an "anti-fit" even, that is somehow perfect because it isn't. i have no problem with the actual fit. this is why every couple of years i go to dave's, buy a pair of shrink to fit(somehow dave's and macy's are the only places in new york to buy the original jean, literally the most simple pair of jeans imaginable) and hope that i won't be let down again.
i'm a sucker.
they always shrink just a bit too much even after the initial soak, the indigo kinda sucks so the fades look really muddled unless you're one of those psychos that doesn't wash their jeans for a year then wears them to the beach to get them soaked in salt water, the leg is somehow both wider and narrower than the prewashed depending on how long you've had them and the actual denim wears through way too quickly.
also their history of terrible quality control that has led to sizing being off between washes even if its the same model. you can buy a dark stone wash and a light stone wash of any mondel of levis and the sizing will be off somehow even if they're the same size. this is why steve mcqueen tried on a kajillion jeans whenever he bought a pair. and that was when levi's was good!
i'll still probably buy a new pair in 18 months. mostly because they'll always be there. they're like david puddy.
lynch's whole thing was that he just wanted to get up, throw whatever pair of pants on and be comfortable. that is, to not think about it. which... yeah! a pair of pants is something you're likely to wear a bunch of times in a row, something you live in so it stands to reason that it should be something comfortable and out of mind. you should be able to be lazy about pants!
this is why i'm so fixated on jeans. i love the b01s but they kind of have too much gear on them so you can't really wear them with everything. they'd look good but it's almost too deliberate sometimes. the painter pants are more subdued but i can't wear white all the time. jeans go with everything.
i thought about fatigue pants because i can dress them up, i can dress them down and olve green is both neutral yet interesting. also as a light skinned brown person i love some olive green. so i went to stella dallas to try some on because they have repros and... i might have slight body image issues now because i don't think wrangler, stan ray or carhartt do vanity sizing(like levi's) BUT-!
maybe i'll give more money to stan ray they make fatigues.
deadass though if i find a near perfect pair of raw denims at blue in green or self edge or fuckin... j crew or whatever i'll buy two and be done with it. those'll be my pants. i'm sick of this.
