More Sweatpants We Love
What to Look for in a Great Pair of Sweats
As with any garment, it’s important to consider the quality of the fabric, the construction involved, and, most importantly, your personal taste. Jonathan Streeks, a fashion influencer who has ID’d more hoodies than bouncers have ID’d club goers, has amassed a huge following for his endless sweats content and earned himself the title of Hoodie Detective. But his hoodie expertise extends to sweats as well.
Some old-school sweats are designed without pockets—you might be wearing yours strictly for chilling, but having a pocket to hold your phone is probably a good idea. Streeks says there are a few non-negotiables. “Sweatpants must be comfortable over long periods of time. An elastic or drawstring waistline and fabric that does not shrink after multiple wash/dry cycles is essential and guarantees the garment will fit the same for months and years.” Ari Katz, brand director of Everybody.World says sweats should be “Practical but unfussy, made from industry-challenging earth-friendly materials and with thoughtful details like deep pockets and an inside drawcord.” Eventually, the elasticity of the fabric inside the waistband will deteriorate and lose its stretch, so that drawstring will help extend the life of your sweats.
Ideally, sweatpants should be sewn with flatlock stitching. In this kind of stitching, two pieces of fabric abut each other rather than overlap, and the stitching zig-zags across the two pieces. The result is a smoother, less bulky construction..
How We Test and Review Products
Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.
Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.
How We Make These Picks
We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.
To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about what hangs in their closets.
We lean on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.
Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.