A put up on X claimed to be a easy message from the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Companies: Keep energetic; 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 just a little 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, at the same time as Kennedy performs pickleball, then mugs for the digital camera, 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 considered greater than 13 million instances and produced some 11,000 replies; HHS didn’t reply to a request for remark concerning 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 understanding in belted denim lengthy predates the figuring out wink with which it’s now displayed. Take the summer time’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, sporting denims and boots and nothing else, squeezing out a ultimate set on Venice Seaside. I don’t consider that these present a person who lifts in denims to maximise his clicks. I consider that they present as an alternative a person who matches a waning archetype in health tradition, a species that has for many years been endemic to the health club: 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 gradual presence on the rubber flooring. They’re generally taciturn, generally chatty. They usually pair their denims with boots, as Kennedy will do, and with a T-shirt or a tank high or a hoodie. However lest you assume he merely has no truck with any gym-specific gear, the denims man is usually noticed sporting padded lifting gloves, or a leather-based lifting belt throughout his Levi’s. At instances, his social position will overlap with that of different weight-room regulars, not least of which is the health club grandpawho hangs round and shoots the breeze and doles out recommendations on tips on how to elevate. Nevertheless he seems, and nonetheless a lot he gabs, the denims man’s social standing is similar: He’s an outsider. Not often does one discover a denims man paired up with a exercise accomplice. “It’s normally like, ‘The denims man rides alone,’” Tolga Ozyurtcu, a historian of bodily tradition on the College of Texas at Austin, advised me after I known as him as much as discuss this phenomenon.
Not everybody enjoys the corporate of the denims man. Some see him as a risk. Planet Health as soon as made some extent of banning denim within the health club, 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 manner, the denims guys are akin to different light curiosities, such because the shorts guys who alight on school campuses in wintertime, and the black chipmunks that scamper by occasionally 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 sporting shorts, and he’ll seemingly let you know 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: “Properly, I simply began doing that a very long time in the past as a result of I’d go climbing within the morning after which I’d go straight to the health club, 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 moderately, in shorts—occur to ask Kennedy about his denim pants and boots? He did. “I requested him proper then, you realize, like, ‘So, you’re banging it out in denims?,’” he advised me. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, man, that is my environment friendly manner. 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’t actually fathom why he lives the best way he does. Kennedy’s isn’t any exception to this rule. In public appearances, he’s virtually all the time in a go well with and thin tie, so including a day by day interlude in exercise denim would hardly appear to be a manner 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, advised me. “It’s a trope we’ve had for the reason that ’80s.” The ability lifters of the time, a few of whom have been linked to the biker subculture, adopted a “rugged, spit-and-sawdust aesthetic” within the health club, 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 in the present day—Kennedy himself is 72—are nothing lower than residing fossils.
Their aesthetic could have light 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 operating very quick and really far … in denims. He claims that this began as a goof, but it surely has changed into a enterprise. He now represents a denim firm, in addition to a chafing cream. The thought of understanding in denims, partly foolish and partly critical, is in all places when you begin to search for it. One gymwear model, Raskol, launched a line of lifter jeggings in 2023 in shades reminiscent of “blue steele” and “pale thunder,” with a tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign that had bodybuilders boasting of their pleasure 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 recommended. 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 for the reason that early nineteenth century. Now the identical may very well be taking place to denim exercise pants: At this time’s goof evolves into tomorrow’s masculine best. “I believe irony strikes into trend in a short time in health,” Heffernan stated.
For Kennedy, this course of could seem like entering 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.” But it surely 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 health club, and there are lots of methods of going backwards in pursuit of well being whereas pretending that you just’ve discovered a manner into the longer term. MAHA is nostalgia, generally with a smirk. The denims man dunks himself in water. The denims man is reborn.
