Tyler Brule Decries Sweatpants as "A Symbol of Social Decay"

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Monocle founder (and Wallpaper* founder) Tyler Brule—a man who, since the 1990s, has embodied modern lifestyle, form-meets-function, practicality, and super-cool—rants in the Financial Times about a fashion scourge plaguing the UK: sweatpants. In fact, he points to the recent riots across the country and compares sweatpants to the Palestinian keffiyeh:

Never mind the hoodies, shades and bandanas worn to obscure faces and avoid easy identification on CCTV—the garment that most represents this struggle is a pair of droopy sweatpants worn halfway down the posterior. It might be a bit much to compare a pair of grey Nike sweatpants sagging around the knees of a rioting 16-year-old in Clapham to a keffiyeh worn by a young man hurling masonry in Ramallah, but sweatpants have become as much a symbol of social decay across the UK as the keffiyeh became a fabric of protest and identity for Palestinians—and, latterly, anyone else with an axe to grind.