The Atlantic What a polarizing garment says about America February 18, 2021 To mid-aughts celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, they were high fashion. To the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Eva Mendes, they’re a sign of defeat; they declare to the world, as Jerry tells George Costanza in the Seinfeld pilot, “I’m miserable, so I might as well be comfortable.” And since the start of the pandemic, sweatpants have become perhaps more ubiquitous than ever. “A lot of people who had been going to offices stopped going to offices for the foreseeable future,” Amanda Mull, a staff writer for