Cargo Pants Are Back & They’re Getting Weird (In a Good Way)

Cargo pants are often associated with two things that should make all true lovers of beauty and style recoil: the military-industrial complex and people who belonged to frats during the presidency of George W. Bush. The modern iteration of the utilitarian garment dates back to the British military during the 1930s and, of course, had a major mall-core fashion resurgence (often in shorts format) during the Y2K era. Quite suddenly, cargoes are back—and all over the highest runways of Paris and New York. These versions, however, aren’t your average Chad’s beloved pair of old Abercrombie shorts. Unless that Chad left them sitting in the back of his closet for the past 20 years with an unknown and potentially hazardous mix of bacteria and chemicals, and they emerged in a frightening new form.

At the recent men’s, resort, and off-calendar shows, designers have been turning the standard cargo pants silhouette into something far more sculptural. Like the mutated six-armed Tyrannosaurus rex that reportedly stars in this weekend’s new Jurassic World movie, fashion has morphed cargo pants into something far more bizarre than their creators could have ever imagined.

The most talked-about pair, surely, are the ones that opened (and then reappeared in various colors through) Jonathan Anderson’s debut menswear show at Dior. Anderson cross-pollinated the standard cargo short with The Delft, a couture evening gown designed by Christian Dior himself back in 1947. From the front, they might have looked merely extra baggy, but from the back, the fabric fluttered like kelp in the ocean.

Last night at the New York Public Library, Marc Jacobs also opened his fall 2025 show with a cargo pants look. His were oversize and inflated. They looked like the only legs they could fit over were the robotic ones on Arca’s Kick I album cover (or Katy Perry’s “Women’s World” single cover, if you don’t quite get that reference).

Korean label Juun.J’s spring show draped cargo shorts on top of cargo shorts to create what we can only imagine would be the result of American Eagle Outfitters x Dr. Victor Frankstein capsule collection.

Willy Chavarria has long mixed the style staples of his Mexican-American heritage with classic runway codes—and this season, offered his take on the pants. His mixed in elements of classic basketball shorts, too, which seems to be a major part of his next collaboration with Adidas.

If you’d allow us to get a little faux-intellectual with it, perhaps we’d suggest that designers are responding to the times by taking a garment historically associated with both warfare and the sort of male privilege best exemplified by a state school fraternity and cross-pollinating it with femininity to create something unexpected and pointedly beautiful. Fashion’s version of trench art, perhaps?

If we were more cynical, we’d say that revitalizing controversial Y2K styles is a guaranteed attention-getter, and that thrifted cargo shorts have already made a strong comeback in certain artier enclaves—and were, hence, due for a mainstream revival.

Whatever the case, something tells us these won’t be the last pair of delightfully fucked-up cargo pants we see on the runways.