One Year of The Sport Kick Ick

Call the High Sport Help Hotline…

We don’t really do post mortems on trends. By the time we could ask, Did anyone actually keep this? we’ve already moved on to the next.

There’s always something new to chase, a fresh obsession to latch onto. But if we took a moment to look back, we might realize that so often the next thing could just be another version of the last thing—one that doesn’t actually live up to the hysteria.

And what better example than the High Sport pants?

Remember those? The $900 kick-flare pants that dominated fashion newsletters, last year? The ones that were always sold out, yet somehow every “if you know, you know” stylish person on the internet magically had a pair? Yeah, those.

A year ago, I wrote two deep dive articles about High Sport, these mysterious, wildly expensive pants that were supposed to be the best of both worlds—polished but comfy, structured but stretchy. If you were even remotely fashion adjacent online, it felt like you had to care about these pants. And I did. For a minute.

So I went…