Ripped bodies and, finally, some jeans to fit

Beth Newell and Adil Abubakar hit a snag early in their attempt to start a clothing company. The manufacturer was having difficulty believing that their measurements were accurate. “Something is wrong,” the factory technician wrote to them in an email. “The pattern shape is not good. Are you sure about the measures?”

For months, they went back and forth. One garment worker said he had been with that manufacturer for 30 years and had never seen a pattern like the one Newell and Abubakar submitted. But they pressed on. “It was both funny and frustrating,” Abubakar said. “They were like: ‘People don’t have these measurements. What are you guys doing?’?” But Newell knew what she was after. People did have these measurements. She was one of them. A national cycling champion and a 2016 Olympic hopeful, Newell said finding comfortable jeans could be a nightmare, practically impossible. Racing had left her and her colleagues with thighs like bowling balls.

Forget the skinny “thigh gap” cuts favored by conventional brands. They needed pants with legs shaped like a “P,” like flare jeans, except upside down.

When Newell was quoted in an article in The New York Times during the 2012 London Olympics about the extraordinary quadriceps sizes of cyclists, Abubakar, a project management consultant from Piscataway, New Jersey, had an epiphany. He looked for Newell's email address. As it turned out, she had been trying to get people to listen to her ideas about pants for a while. So she became the fit model and he became the brand architect. Two years later, their company, Keirin Cut Jeans, has raised more than $68,000 on Kickstarter in less than a month.

It is one of a handful of niche-minded companies that in the last year have started targeting curvy men and women - not to accentuate their hips, but to accommodate their thighs. Barbell Apparel, founded by four weightlifters in Las Vegas, raised more than $730,000 in a 45-day online campaign, and it is close to fulfilling more than 10,000 orders for the holiday season. Two others, Relentless Jeans, of West Hartford, Connecticut, and Tailors of Atlas, from Dallas, were designed to suit bodybuilders’ physiques. Their founders determined - oddly, at about the same time - that they were fed up with the limited options of brand names. They decided to think outside the inseam, so to speak.

Zach Bartholomew, who started Tailors of Atlas, said he measured a standard pair of men’s jeans, with a 34-inch waist, and found the circumference of the thigh area to be about 23 inches. That was not going to cut it for someone like him with a 32-inch waist and 27-inch quads. And Bartholomew is not a professional athlete. He works for a telecommunications company. He goes to the gym five times a week, tops, and plays in a flag football league. He considered himself fairly average in an age when so many people are joining CrossFit or SoulCycle programs. “I’m not squatting 600 pounds or anything,” Bartholomew, 27, said. “I’m a normal dude. I can’t even imagine what professional athletes or bodybuilders are experiencing. If I’m experiencing this, I can’t imagine the problems that they have.”

In posts on a blog, Newell chronicled the everyday plight of a competitive biker trying on jeans at the mall. Her own quads measure nearly 24 inches apiece in circumference, or about the waist size of a typical 10-year-old girl.

“The big issue is you find a pair of pants that will fit around your quads, and then you actually have to buy like three sizes up to fit around your waist,” Newell said. “So you have this huge gaping hole at your waistline just so they’ll fit around your legs. So you have to have a belt, or you have all this bunching on the side. It’s funny.”

Hunter Molzen, 25, one of Barbell’s founders, said most of the weight lifters he was familiar with had given up looking for jeans. “There were some high-end designer brands that if you bought them two sizes too big, with a nice spandex material, you could squeeze your legs into them,” Molzen said. “Other than that, we just wouldn’t wear jeans.”

Knowing what his target consumer would be looking for, Molzen designed Barbell’s $149 jeans using higher-end denim with extra elasticity. “People who have a lot of muscle already feel bulky in clothes a lot of times,” Molzen said. “The last thing you want to do is put on a pair of jeans where you can barely move, you can barely sit down. So we wanted to make sure that you have a full range of motion in our jeans.”

Keirin Cut Jeans, named after a type of track bike racing, is targeting the cycling crowd, branching out from Newell’s professional contacts. Years earlier, she tried to persuade a company executive she knew to heed her advice about making jeans with roomy quads. But she was laughed off. Now Levi’s has an “athletic fit” jean endorsed by NFL players Anquan Boldin and Vernon Davis. Newell said her products are even more finely detailed, noting that even the spacing of the pockets on the backside are better fitting for athletes who had larger rear ends in correlation with their quads. “As an athlete, your butt is a really important part of your power transfer,” Newell said. “You’re doing a lot of squats and lunges and things that make your backside really strong. Then you put on jeans and because of where the pockets are, it makes your butt look awful when, in fact, you probably have a really good butt.” What might be the next frontier for these companies? “Shorts,” Molzen said with a sigh. “They can be worse than jeans a lot of times.”

New York Times