Greetings from snowy Milwaukee. Whenever I travel, I’ll often swing by the newspaper stand at the airport and pick up a New York Times and maybe a Wall Street Journal. It gives me something to do on the plane if I don’t want to bother with WiFi.
A few days ago, I did just that, and there was a feature article about how people were dressing much more casually on planes. The article said that, on the one hand, a business traveler doesn’t want to wear a suit, but on the other, they don’t want to be loafing around in ratty old sweatpants. Thus, there was a happy compromise reached with “nice” sweatpants, and they showed about eight different choices. Here was one of them:
So, yes, you read that right. About one thousand dollars for a pair of freakin’ sweatpants. I grabbed the screenshot above from the Zegna website, since I frankly couldn’t believe what I had seen in the WSJ.
Zegna is a well known tailor (I’ve got a few products of theirs, although not the aforementioned pants), but I don’t exactly hang out on their site. As long as I was there, I was curious what other “pants” offerings they had. Behold:
Hideous enough for ya? Honestly, can you imagine spending $1300 on such a thing and wearing it to the office? Actually, it’ll cost you more than that, if you include the costs for multiple therapy sessions that you’ll need after the verbal abuse you’re guaranteed to endure.
Of course, if you’re sensible (or, like me, cheap), there are options other than Zegna. You could pop over to Amazon and, for literally 97% less:
The simple fact is that if you stroll onto a Southwest jet with your $995 Zegna pants or, alternately, the $36 Gihuo pants, the number of people who are going to notice one over the other is exactly zero. And the number of people who are going to care is even less than that.
