A year or so ago, a lot of women I don’t know started trying to sell me soft pants. Some of the pants had elastic waists, some drawstring; some were cotton, some linen, some silk; some of them came in practical neutrals, some in pleasing popsicle shades of blue and red. Not a single pair cost less than $100.
I put myself in the line of this marketing, to be clear. I was on a hunt. After my daughter was born, I longed for my old wardrobe, which consisted mainly of rigid vintage denim, but I had a sore cesarean-section scar and a waistline that changed every two weeks. Once the jeans became available to me again, I discovered—and yes, I fought this—that they were incorrect for my new life. Building block towers on the floor is fun, but less so if you’re doing it in tight Levi’s 501s. What I needed were some loose clothes that read stylish yet practical. I didn’t have time to go shopping in person, so I started Googling, which led me to a swarm of clothing-focused Substacks that catered to moms.
Still, when I started seeing the same pants in the newsletters, on my Instagram feed, in the targeted ads that hound me from website to website, and in a Cut piece about how stylish moms dress, it threw me. On the one hand, the ubiquity of the pants was validating: I was relieved that my closet issues weren’t mine alone. On the other hand, the vision was so uniform. It was, in fact, a uniform. I’d gone in search of a wardrobe that worked for playdates and playgrounds and days when I go straight from work to an evening of child care, and what I found was an emerging archetype of the Cool Millennial Mom.
[Read: Cool people accidentally saved America’s feet]
A Cool Millennial Mom has a small child or two. She probably lives in Brooklyn or Los Angeles, though she could be in another city or picturesque suburb. She generally has a job, but either she’s self-employed or her role is accommodating enough that she’s the parent in charge of school drop-off. Maybe she can even go to Pilates afterward, though she’s just as likely to head to a meeting. She has a lot of work and—if she’s not in the office—a lot of errands to get done, and she wants to be comfortable yet put together. Besides, she has to be presentable enough that, if the mood is right, she and her partner can take their kids out to a casual dinner rather than cooking; after all, this mom wasn’t home all day in an apron. She was running around in an expensive sweater and a chic pair of tie-waist pants. She is busy, and busyness, I have come to realize, is core to both the aesthetic and the deeper promise of the Cool Millennial Mom.
I’m inventing this woman, but not entirely. She appears, either as an online persona or a categorizable type, in the newsletters of women with anywhere from a few thousand to 32,000 subscribers. She is featured on blogs. She is especially well embodied by the social-media persona of Alyssa Wasko Stein. Wasko Stein, who lives in Los Angeles, is the founder and designer of Donni, the clear leader of the expensive-soft-pants-selling pack (and the subject of the aforementioned Cut article). Although the company’s least expensive pair of pants is $144, I see them routinely in the wild. Also, I’ve bought them. Wasko Stein herself dresses very stylishly, in her own designs, and posts Instagram stories and carousels that beguile me with the appealing range of her weekly routine: Here she is dressing models at a shoot, here cuddling her daughter, here having Shabbat dinner. Her life, as she displays it, is an optimal advertisement for the clothes she creates.
Wasko Stein’s online presence—heavy on recommendations for niche luxuries such as Belgian shoes—also models a sense of being in the know. This is core to the idea of the cool mom; she is a woman who, as the newsletter writer and fashion journalist Maura Brannigan has put it, wears “interesting shoes to the playground” and has “good taste in both children’s books and literary fiction.”
[Read: The unglamorous truth about the average tradwife]
Developing this taste takes time, energy, and an impulse toward eclecticism, which contrasts noticeably with other archetypes of motherhood: the prairie-dressed tradwife; the Mean Girls mom with her Juicy velour and cement-solid boob job; the corporate working mother trying to “have it all” in a power suit. The Cool Millennial Mom wants to have it all in another way entirely. The ideal here is of a rewarding, varied life whose parts, disparate though they are, interlock seamlessly. It’s a demanding goal, which is why she needs a versatile wardrobe. A pencil skirt is no good for coaching soccer practice; a calico dress isn’t right for a meeting; loungewear doesn’t work at a gallery. With some clever styling, though, the cool-mom pants can look right—and be comfortable—everywhere.
Of course, “clever styling” is not, in fact, effortless, even if your clothes and shoes are meant to seem as if you just tugged and kicked them on. Getting the cool-mom look right requires dedication; not for nothing does Donni teach its shoppers how to tie a shirt around their waist. When a sweater doesn’t drape right or the tie-waist pants sit too low, the look swiftly becomes disheveled or, worse, pajama-esque. The aesthetic of busyness suggests striving unrelated to clothing, but the look requires, at baseline, the exertion of learning which pants are cool, earning enough to buy them, and then wearing them such that they don’t seem like scrubs.
If it sounds like I’m making fun, perhaps I am a little, with affection. Every generation, or even every micro-generation, probably gets its own hard-to-attain and easily mockable ideal of the cool mom, and I’m glad enough that this is mine. Most mothers I know, myself included, want and endeavor for lives that can accommodate all the parts of ourselves, the ones we cultivated before having children and the ones that emerge as our kids’ personalities do. And yes, all right, we can be just as vain as we might have been pre-parenthood: We want to lead our full, overwhelming, multifaceted lives in good pants.
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