Is There Something RFK Jr. Wouldn’t Do in Denims?

A submit on X claimed to be a easy message from the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Companies: Keep lively; eat effectively. However the 90-second video it shared, known as “Secretary Kennedy and Child Rock’s Rock Out Work Out,” appears designed to be bewildering. Right here was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. consuming steak and doing preacher curls in his belted blue denims and a pair of climbing footwear; and right here he was once more, stripping off his T-shirt to trip an train bike inside a sauna; and right here he was somewhat later, strutting over to a cold-plunge tub (nonetheless in his blue denims however with the belt eliminated); and right here he went into the bathtub, sliding underwater in his dungarees.

Why was the HHS secretary bathing in a pair of pants? The video by no means supplies a solution for this query, whilst Kennedy performs pickleball, then mugs for the digicam, then soaks in a Jacuzzi with a glass of milk, all whereas nonetheless in denims. It’s simply weird—a PSA that presumably has been dialed in by his employees to maximise its WTF impact. (The video has been seen greater than 13 million instances and produced some 11,000 replies; HHS didn’t reply to a request for remark in regards to the video or the denims.) Nevertheless his peculiar gymwear behavior began, its current state could be very clear: The secretary’s denims are self-aware.

Kennedy’s proclivity for figuring out in belted denim lengthy predates the realizing wink with which it’s now displayed. Take the summer season’s “DOD-HHS Health Problem,” for which Kennedy donned his favourite exercise gear and did a bunch of pull-ups with Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth. Or the viral clip of him from 2023, carrying denims and boots and nothing else, squeezing out a last set on Venice Seaside. I don’t imagine that these present a person who lifts in denims to maximise his clicks. I imagine that they present as an alternative a person who suits a waning archetype in health tradition, a species that has for many years been endemic to the gymnasium: Kennedy is a denims man.

I’ve labored out, on and off, for greater than 30 years—and for all of that point, the denims guys have remained a gentle presence on the rubber flooring. They’re typically taciturn, typically chatty. They typically pair their denims with boots, as Kennedy will do, and with a T-shirt or a tank prime or a hoodie. However lest you suppose he merely has no truck with any gym-specific gear, the denims man is typically noticed carrying padded lifting gloves, or a leather-based lifting belt throughout his Levi’s. At instances, his social function will overlap with that of different weight-room regulars, not least of which the gymnasium grandpa, who hangs round and shoots the breeze and doles out tips about easy methods to raise. Nevertheless he seems, and nevertheless a lot he gabs, the denims man’s social standing is similar: He’s an outsider. Hardly ever does one discover a denims man paired up with a exercise accomplice. “It’s often like, ‘The denims man rides alone,’” Tolga Ozyurtcu, a historian of bodily tradition on the College of Texas at Austin, instructed me after I known as him as much as speak about this phenomenon.

Not everybody enjoys the corporate of the denims man. Some see him as a risk. Planet Health as soon as made a degree of banning denim within the gymnasium, together with grunting, dropping dumbbells, and judging others. (Those that broke these guidelines may very well be punished with a “lunk alarm” and summarily kicked out.) However this discrimination feels as ill-considered as it’s unfair: In my expertise, denims guys are innocent on the very worst, and at finest, they add some wanted coloration to a dreary panorama. On this approach, the denims guys are akin to different mild curiosities, such because the shorts guys who alight on school campuses in wintertime, and the black chipmunks that scamper by once in a while in metropolis parks.

What motivates the denims man? Nobody is aware of. He’s, if nothing else, as inscrutable as a four-leaf clover. Ask him why he isn’t carrying shorts, and he’ll seemingly inform you that he chooses denim for effectivity. When Fox Information’s Jesse Watters requested Kennedy in August to clarify his favored exercise gear, all Watters acquired was this: “Nicely, I simply began doing that a very long time in the past as a result of I might go climbing within the morning after which I’d go straight to the gymnasium, and I discovered it was handy, and now I’m used to it.” Within the hope of getting extra, I reached out to Ryan Calder, the health coach who noticed Kennedy on the incline bench in that viral video from 2023. Did Calder—who on the time was dressed, fairly fairly, in shorts—occur to ask Kennedy about his denim pants and boots? He did. “I requested him proper then, , like, ‘So, you’re banging it out in denims?’,” he instructed me. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, man, that is my environment friendly approach. I solely have half-hour. I don’t spend time altering garments.”

A denims man’s self-report have to be taken with a grain of salt—possibly even he can not actually fathom why he lives the way in which he does. Kennedy’s isn’t any exception to this rule. In public appearances, he’s nearly all the time in a swimsuit and skinny tie, so including a every day interlude in exercise denim would hardly appear to be a approach of saving time. His behavior could also be as an alternative a product of the exercise tradition he imbibed throughout his youth. “The denims man, it’s a factor. It’s a really definitive factor,” Conor Heffernan, a health historian at Ulster College, instructed me. “It’s a trope we’ve had because the ’80s.” The ability lifters of the time, a few of whom had been related to the biker subculture, adopted a “rugged, spit-and-sawdust aesthetic” within the gymnasium, he stated. This included denim. Throughout the identical interval, glitzy photoshoots for bodybuilders additionally featured denims, to match the kinds of the time. Heffernan introduced up a well-known photograph of Lee Haney, the eight-time Mr. Olympia, flexing shirtless in a pair of denims above a steamy manhole cowl in New York Metropolis. Maybe the older denims guys of at the moment—Kennedy himself is 72—are nothing lower than dwelling fossils.

Their aesthetic might have pale out, however a youthful set of denims guys—ironic denims guys—has since emerged within the health tradition. Take the influencer-marathoner Truett Hanes: His model is constructed on working very quick and really far … in denims. He claims that this began as a goof, but it surely has became a enterprise. He now represents a denim firm, in addition to a chafing cream. The concept of figuring out in denims, partly foolish and partly severe, is all over the place when you begin to search for it. One gymwear model, Raskol, launched a line of lifter jeggings in 2023 in shades corresponding to “blue steele” and “pale thunder,” with a tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign that had bodybuilders boasting of their delight at utilizing PEDs—that’s, “performance-enhancing jeans.”

This self-mocking transfer could also be simply the prelude to a fuller jeans-guy renaissance, Heffernan prompt. In any case, Raskol’s jeggings did promote out, he stated. And this wouldn’t be the primary time {that a} conventional signifier of masculinity crept again into mainstream tradition by means of performative half jokes. The style for bushy beards, and beards’ affiliation with genuine manliness, has adopted this similar trajectory from irony to earnestness throughout its varied resurgences because the early nineteenth century. Now the identical may very well be taking place to denim exercise pants: Right this moment’s goof evolves into tomorrow’s masculine preferrred. “I feel irony strikes into vogue in a short time in health,” stated Heffernan.

For Kennedy, this course of might look like getting into reverse: His newest exercise video reveals that he’s in on the joke, that in 2026 he’s able to pumping irony in addition to iron, and that he can interact in what Heffernan described as “a really deliberate deployment of denims.” However it additionally reveals that there’s a recipe, if not a cultural equipment, for rehabilitating out-of-date concepts. Not all of Kennedy’s eccentricities are as quaint as how he clothes within the gymnasium, and there are a lot of methods of going backwards in pursuit of well being whereas pretending that you just’ve discovered a approach into the long run. MAHA is nostalgia, typically with a smirk. The denims man dunks himself in water. The denims man is reborn.