Cargo Pants

The pockets were not a fashion decision. Cargo pants descend from battle dress first worn by the British Armed Forces in 1938, where the large thigh pockets existed to hold field dressings, maps, and other items a soldier needed to reach without taking off a pack. The design came to the United States during the Second World War, where the concept was copied into the U.S. paratrooper uniform to make room for K rations and extra ammunition. Every empty pocket slapping against a suburban teenager's leg sixty years later was, structurally speaking, meant for ammunition.

The civilian version took its time. Cargo shorts got there first — marketed in 1980 as ideal for the sportsman or fisherman, then breaking into mainstream men's fashion by the mid-to-late 1990s — but the full-length pants were a distinctly early-2000s phenomenon. They arrived as the enormous baggy jeans of the '90s receded, offering roughly the same volume with an engineering justification, and for a stretch of the decade they were unavoidable: on skaters, on boy bands, on dads, in every mall from the surf-branded end to the department store. Nobody carried anything in the pockets. That was never the point.

The backlash was thorough enough that cargo pants spent well over a decade as a punchline, the standard shorthand for a man who had stopped trying. Then the wheel turned: they returned in the 2020s as part of the Y2K revival, worn by people young enough to find them genuinely novel and marketed explicitly as a 2000s artifact — which, in fairness, is exactly what they are.