Would You Spend $860 on These Stretchy Pants?

How High Sport made something so basic so coveted.

- Hilary Reid

DEPENDING ON whom you ask, it started with Leandra Medine Cohen. Or stylist and newsletter writer Becky Malinsky. Writer Emily Sundberg first saw the High Sport kick flare pants on Medine Cohen, and so did Puck fashion correspondent Lauren Sherman (who later tweeted that she saw them on director Nancy Meyers, too).

Ceramicist Isabel Halley noticed them on the writer and editor Thessaly La Force, then texted illustrator Joana Avillez about them. Natalie Ebel, co-founder of paint and wallcovering company Backdrop, saw them on stylist Juliana Salazar and happened to have bought them around the same time that her friend Mélanie Masarin, founder of the nonalcoholic-aperitif company Ghia, procured a pair. Then, this past December, Ebel and Masarin attended a party in Highland Park.

"I went to the Flamingo Estate holiday party and I see this girl and she's basically doing splits on the floor-not fully split but stretching and she was clearly showing her pants to someone.

I was like, She's for sure wearing High Sport pants," says Masarin. (She-who turned out to be writer and editor Laurel Pantin-was.) The High Sport pants cost $860 or $890, depending on the length, and are not particularly outstanding: pull-on with a seam down the front and a slightly flared bottom. They are made from a weave of 68 percent cotton and 32 percent Lycra and come in a range of Helen Frankenthaler-esque colors.