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The story
On 5channel’s “Nandemo Jikkyo” (Live Commentary) board, a user posted images of the “sweatpants” fashion currently trending among young people, and another user who called it “lame” sparked a debate over the generational gap in taste. The thread saw a wave of pushback — “sweats have come back into style again and again since the Ice Age Generation and yankee-culture eras,” “young people today wear cheap fast fashion, not brand-name stuff” — with many commenters agreeing less about the fashion itself and more with the point that “trends just repeat across generations.”
What people said
This is the sweatpants fashion trending with young people right now
Looks like they just rolled out of bed and walked straight outside.
Saw this on the train earlier too — both the guys and the girls, college-age, all wearing it.
The old guy's right, it's lame.
That trend came out of hip-hop and the dancer scene, so this is just that era's style having a revival.
I'm 46, and back then it was sagging, low-slung pants (koshi-pan).
It's the same story in every era.
That makes it even more lame.
Can't this generation even invent its own trend?
Those were proper joggers, though.
What's trending now is basically loungewear — honestly just pajamas.
Back when us old guys were young, we wore suits and jackets from the 'DC brands' (Japan's premium 1980s designer labels, like Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto).
Actually it's the opposite — young people aren't poor when you look at wages, and their raises come faster than previous generations got.
Compared to the old Ice Age Generation now in their 40s and 50s, today's 20-somethings are genuinely earning more at this stage in life.
In the end they're just losers who can only repeat history.
History repeats itself.
'Typical Gen Z…'
'Typical yutori generation…' (Japan's so-called 'relaxed-education' millennials)
'Typical millennials…'
'Typical shinjinrui…' ('new breed,' a 1980s label for the youth of that time)
'Typical dankai junior…' (children of Japan's baby boomers)
'Typical kids these days…'
'Typical moga and mobo…' (1920s Japanese flappers and dandies)
isn't this just that spreading to regular people?
They were trendy as outdoor fashion 30 years ago.
That's a completely different thing from the 2,980-yen top-and-bottom set some old guy would buy.
So what?
Does being expensive make a garbage outfit acceptable?
Most of them are actually wearing cheap clothes, though.
Uniqlo sweats run under 3,000 yen.
Kids like this actually think expensive branded sweats are lame.
People just don't spend much on clothes anymore.
Aside from the tiny minority in luxury brands, most of them are broke — it's not even Uniqlo, it's dirt-cheap overseas fast fashion like SHEIN.
Nobody says a word about them now, though.
Fashion trends just change with the times, that's all it is.
Now, with everyone thrown together on the internet and social media, getting called out directly is honestly kind of sad.
And the biggest victim of that is middle-aged guys, honestly.
The Korean wave?
Yeah, it's from dancers' practice wear.
The elastic cuff at the ankle is so lame.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Sweatpants and jogger-style pants first spread to Japan in the 1990s through the hip-hop and outdoor-fashion booms, so this isn’t really a brand-new trend — it’s a textbook case of an old trend coming back in a new shape. The spending power behind the youth market isn’t luxury brands but low-price fast fashion like GU, Uniqlo, and SHEIN, which lines up with the thread’s point that these aren’t expensive branded items. Also, before social media, communities were split by generation, so opinions about someone’s clothing rarely reached them directly — but now that timelines mix every generation together, differences in values surface as direct clashes much more easily. It’s worth noting that this generational tug-of-war over ‘lame vs. stylish’ isn’t unique to this case — the same pattern played out before, with jeans and with sagging pants.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo) thread “[Bad News] Man Who Called ‘Sweatpants’ Fashion Lame Gets Mob-Dunked by Gen Z.”
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