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Feb 22, 2024

The Biggest Cargo Pants of the 2000s Are Back at the Mall

By Jake Woolf All products featured on GQ are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Abercrombie’s cargo

By Jake Woolf

All products featured on GQ are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Abercrombie’s cargo pants were crucial to the brand’s appeal in the early 2000s, when its signature look—polos worn collar popped, flip-flops worn everywhere they shouldn’t be—was at the height of its influence. But as the all-American label continues to shrug off the vestiges of its sweat-drenched, cologne-doused heyday, its perspective has reoriented itself accordingly. Gone are the gleaming washboard abs and seamy Bruce Weber campaigns, and in their place is a heightened focus on classic, nouveau prep menswear.

And yet, as Y2K-era style creeps back into the consciousness, Abercrombie has slowly woken up to the gold buried in its archives. Case in point: Earlier last week, the brand re-issued a version of the cargos once virtually inescapable in food courts and high school cafeterias across the country.

Loose Utility Cargo Pant

Abercrombie & Fitch

Much like the originals, the pants are done up in a heavily pre-faded ripstop fabric equipped with a webbed D-ring belt, and boast the requisite surplus of pockets. (Even the main pocket has its own mini pocket!) If they diverge anywhere from their turn-of-the-millennium source material, it’s in their silhouette, a loose cut that stops short of approximating the ginormous look of their predecessors. (For what it's worth, the women’s version skews much closer to OG and is all the better for it.)

Ironically, Abercrombie’s 2023 riff feels a little—dare we say it—square compared to some of the alternatives now sold by its neighbors at the mall. Which isn’t really a bad thing. They’re still capable of syncing up with a splashy striped button-up, formidable skate shoes, or even a toasted pair of ‘flops, but they’ll also play nice with roughed-up black derbies or dainty retro kicks without swallowing them whole. Two decades after they took your local galleria by storm, the cargo pants that helped defined the aesthetic of the early 2000s still got it going on.