Piss pants are in the news this week. A pair of jeans from UK-based Italian-made brand JordanLuca’s Fall/Winter 2023 collection have gone viral on Instagram, despite the fact they were from a full season ago, and the fact that we have been here before.
The jeans are striking, not just for their inbuilt aesthetic of wetting yourself, but also for their fine stonewash, chic slim fit, and sexy minimal styling that lets the stain speak volumes. The images – circulated on social media last week to responses of “why?” and “so fucking stupid” – radiate groaning allure. Piss jeans are hot.
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In 2024, chic piss-pants at Milan Fashion Week are not an aberration, they are a natural evolution.
Because – Piss is so 2021. At that time, busting out of the forced celibacy of isolation, piss iconography peaked as part of a sex-positive explosion that gripped the online world with such force it leaked out into the real one. Piss was cool, “go piss girl” persisted, golden shower memes prevailed, the sex educator Zoe Ligon declared “pee is a million times more exciting than squirt.”
And as Dazed pointed out, JordanLuca was not the first label to offer garments with built-in drip. UK-based designer Di Petsa, whose first collection meditated on female wetness, made piss-stained jeans as early as 2018. Exploring the patriarchal policing of women’s bodies, the Central Saint Martins graduate even developed her own textile to mimic the look of being wet – swathes of seemingly soaked, draped gauzy dresses complemented the bitchy raw-hem-pee-stained jeans. By playing with “being wet in public”, Di Petsa looked at the sterilisation of women in society, with her garments that centred and showcased the historically-repressed arenas of women’s natural excretion: breast milk, sweat, ejaculate, pee.
In late 2019, the year’s it-girl, Alexa Demie, posed in Di Petsa’s piss pants – legs defiantly splayed, pussy thrust forwards. The images are commanding. The piss pants, in their evocation of taboo, make what would otherwise be a regular portrait titillatingly erotic.
Then there’s the aptly named website, Wet Pants Denim. Whether the drab, blasé website is legitimate aside, their Instagram appears to have operated since at least 2020, and they left a comment on Di Petsa’s wet jeans asking to collaborate 360 weeks ago… you do the math.
“Wet pants denim is an iconic fashion brand producing jeans that mimic the aesthetic of urinary incontinence,” a meme on their Instagram account declares.
In the brand’s FAQ section, the question “how did we get here?” is met with, “we’re not too sure, only you can answer that.” The answer to “why” is simple: “There are two key issues with the traditional urinary incontinence aesthetic: Wearing wet pants is uncomfortable [and] when the wet mark dries or the garment is washed, the stain is almost always gone for good.”
In a 2021 episode of the podcast Vanity Project the hosts discussed the popular iconography of “natural champagne” – piss counterculture.
In a society where the concealment of our most human functions is advised, a “reveal” provokes humiliation. And within that, desire. A peek behind the veil at the real, sweating, shitting, pissing person behind the societally-accepted mask is raw. It’s sexy.
Society’s disgust around our bodily fluids is constructed. It is, Vanity Project co-host Charles said, “performative”.
“It’s performative disgust. It’s just like the word moist, it’s about upholding a culture around disgust and humiliation.”
“Piss could be what brings us together, instead they’re using it as a tool to try and pull us apart.”
So let’s let piss bring us together. What is hot about the aesthetic of pissing yourself?
The sexual connotations of being soaked are overt, even before we think of golden showers, wetting fetishes, and adult diapers.
Sex is about playing within dichotomies. Control/release, dominance/submission, humiliation/defiance. Pissing yourself in public could be considered the ultimate loss of control. It’s humiliating and shameful, inbuilt in us from childhood. It’s uncomfortable, psychologically and literally. It’s this tension that excites. In piss pants, the wearer can claim control of their narrative in defiance. Embracing the aesthetic of one of the most embarrassing things that could happen to you is perverse. It’s lewd, and it’s hot. It playfully shouts a fuck-you to kink shaming and extends an open hand to omorashi hopefuls.
We could, if we liked, also interpret JordanLuca’s sold-out piss jeans as a debasing jest at the fashion industry and its consumers. We will buy $1000AUD pants which actively humiliate us if they are chic. We are unable to resist, and actively buy into, our own humiliation and exploitation.
Once, when I was fifteen, a boy told me there were two kinds of people in this world: people who pee in the shower and dirty fucking liars. Even then, if he’d asked me, I would’ve been too humiliated to admit I’d done it. The disgust is performative.
We have all peed in the shower. And we have all, at some point or another, pissed ourselves. Admit it.
Urinary incontinence is not our final taboo: It’s just the next evolution in our piss culture.
Arielle Richards is the multimedia reporter at VICE Australia, follow her on Instagram and TikTok.
