Let’s Discuss About RFK Jr.’s Exercise Pants

A post on X claimed to be a easy message from the U.S. Division of Health and Human Companies: Keep energetic; eat properly. However the 90-second video IT shared, referred to as “Secretary Kennedy and Child Rock’s Rock Out Work Out,” appears designed to be bewildering. Right here was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. consuming steak and doing preacher curls in his belted blue denims and a pair of climbing footwear; and right here he was once more, stripping off his T-shirt to trip an train bike inside a sauna; and right here he was somewhat later, strutting over to a cold-plunge tub (nonetheless in his blue denims however with the belt eliminated); and right here he went into the bathtub, sliding underwater in his dungarees.

Why was the HHS secretary bathing in a pair of pants? The video by no means supplies a solution for this query, at the same time as Kennedy performs pickleball, then mugs for the digital camera, then soaks in a Jacuzzi with a glass of milk, all whereas nonetheless in denims. IT’s simply weird—a PSA that presumably has been dialed in by his employees to maximise its WTF impact. (The video has been seen greater than 13 million occasions and produced some 11,000 replies; HHS didn’t reply to a request for remark concerning the video or the denims.) Nonetheless his peculiar gymwear behavior began, its current state may be very clear: The secretary’s denims are self-aware.

Kennedy’s proclivity for figuring out in belted denim lengthy predates the figuring out wink with which IT’s now displayed. Take the summer time’s “DOD-HHS Health Problem,” for which Kennedy donned his favourite exercise gear and did a bunch of pull-ups with Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth. Or the viral clip of him from 2023, sporting denims and boots and nothing else, squeezing out a final set on Venice Seaside. I don’t imagine that these present a person who lifts in denims to maximise his clicks. I imagine that they present as an alternative a person who matches a waning archetype in health tradition, a species that has for many years been endemic to the gymnasium: Kennedy is a denims man.

I’ve labored out, on and off, for greater than 30 years—and for all of that point, the denims guys have remained a gradual presence on the rubber flooring. They’re typically taciturn, typically chatty. They usually pair their denims with boots, as Kennedy will do, and with a T-shirt or a tank high or a hoodie. However lest you suppose he merely has no truck with any gym-specific gear, the denims man is typically noticed sporting padded lifting gloves, or a leather-based lifting belt throughout his Levi’s. At occasions, his social function will overlap with that of different weight-room regulars, not least of which is the gymnasium grandpa, who hangs round and shoots the breeze and doles out tips about the way to raise. Nonetheless he seems, and nonetheless a lot he gabs, the denims man’s social standing is identical: He’s an outsider. Not often does one discover a denims man paired up with a exercise associate. “IT’s often like, ‘The denims man rides alone,’” Tolga Ozyurtcu, a historian of bodily tradition on the College of Texas at Austin, advised me after I referred to as him as much as speak about this phenomenon.

Not everybody enjoys the corporate of the denims man. Some see him as a menace. Planet Health as soon as made some extent of banning denim within the gymnasium, together with grunting, dropping dumbbells, and judging others. (Those that broke these guidelines could possibly be punished with a “lunk alarm” and summarily kicked out.) However this discrimination feels as ill-considered as IT is unfair: In my expertise, denims guys are innocent on the very worst, and at greatest, they add some wanted coloration to a dreary panorama. On this approach, the denims guys are akin to different mild curiosities, such because the shorts guys who alight on faculty campuses in wintertime, and the black chipmunks that scamper by infrequently in metropolis parks.

What motivates the denims man? Nobody is aware of. He’s, if nothing else, as inscrutable as a four-leaf clover. Ask him why he isn’t sporting shorts, and he’ll possible inform you that he chooses denim for effectivity. When Fox Information’s Jesse Watters requested Kennedy in August to elucidate his favored exercise gear, all Watters received was this: “Effectively, I simply began doing that a very long time in the past as a result of I might go climbing within the morning after which I’d go straight to the gymnasium, and I discovered IT was handy, and now I’m used to IT.” Within the hope of getting extra, I reached out to Ryan Calder, the health coach who noticed Kennedy on the incline bench in that viral video from 2023. Did Calder—who on the time was dressed, fairly fairly, in shorts—occur to ask Kennedy about his denim pants and boots? He did. “I requested him proper then, you recognize, like, ‘So, you’re banging IT out in denims?,’” he advised me. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, man, that is my environment friendly approach. I solely have half-hour. I don’t spend time altering garments.”

A denims man’s self-report should be taken with a grain of salt—perhaps even he can not actually fathom why he lives the best way he does. Kennedy’s isn’t any exception to this rule. In public appearances, he’s nearly all the time in a swimsuit and skinny tie, so including a every day interlude in exercise denim would hardly appear to be a approach of saving time. His behavior could also be as an alternative a product of the exercise tradition he imbibed throughout his youth. “The denims man, IT’s a factor. IT’s a really definitive factor,” Conor Heffernan, a fitness historian at Ulster College, advised me. “IT’s a trope we’ve had because the ’80s.” The ability lifters of the time, a few of whom had been linked to the biker subculture, adopted a “rugged, spit-and-sawdust aesthetic” within the gymnasium, he stated. This included denim. Throughout the identical interval, glitzy photoshoots for bodybuilders additionally featured denims, to match the kinds of the time. Heffernan introduced up a well-known photo of Lee Haney, the eight-time Mr. Olympia, flexing shirtless in a pair of denims above a steamy manhole cowl in New York Metropolis. Maybe the older denims guys of immediately—Kennedy himself is 72—are nothing lower than residing fossils.

Their aesthetic could have pale out, however a youthful set of denims guys—ironic denims guys—has since emerged within the health tradition. Take the influencer-marathoner Truett Hanes: His brand is constructed on working very quick and really far … in jeans. He claims that this began as a goof, however IT has become a enterprise. He now represents a denim firm, in addition to a chafing cream. The thought of figuring out in denims, partly foolish and partly critical, is in every single place when you begin to search for IT. One gymwear model, Raskol, launched a line of lifter jeggings in 2023 in shades similar to “blue steele” and “pale thunder,” with a tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign that had bodybuilders boasting of their delight at utilizing PEDs—that’s, “performance-enhancing denims.”

This self-mocking transfer could also be simply the prelude to a fuller jeans-guy renaissance, Heffernan steered. In any case, Raskol’s jeggings did promote out, he stated. And this wouldn’t be the primary time {that a} conventional signifier of masculinity crept again into mainstream tradition by the use of performative half jokes. The style for bushy beards, and beards’ affiliation with genuine manliness, has adopted this same trajectory from irony to earnestness throughout its varied resurgences because the early nineteenth century. Now the identical could possibly be occurring to denim exercise pants: Immediately’s goof evolves into tomorrow’s masculine excellent. “I feel irony strikes into trend in a short time in health,” Heffernan stated.

For Kennedy, this course of could look like entering into reverse: His newest exercise video reveals that he’s in on the joke, that in 2026 he’s able to pumping irony in addition to iron, and that he can have interaction in what Heffernan described as “a really deliberate deployment of denims.” However IT additionally reveals that there’s a recipe, if not a cultural equipment, for rehabilitating out-of-date concepts. Not all of Kennedy’s eccentricities are as quaint as how he clothes within the gymnasium, and there are numerous methods of going backwards in pursuit of Health whereas pretending that you just’ve discovered a approach into the longer term. MAHA is nostalgia, typically with a smirk. The denims man dunks himself in water. The denims man is reborn.