I have a professional obligation to tell you that the J.Crew Giant-fit chinos are on sale for Cyber Monday. They’re great, they’re 30% off, and that’s all you really need to know. But if you want to hear a lil’ story detailing why, exactly, you need to know this, cancel your next meeting, pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee, and allow me to explain.
For reasons long since lost to science (and maybe my therapist’s notepad), I simply can’t stop buying chinos. J.Crew’s aptly-named Giant-fits are among my favorites. When they first launched in 2022, they immediately went viral, catapulting J.Crew and Brendon Babenzian, its then-new creative director, to the forefront of the menswear conversation. Which is just a long-winded way of saying: they’re popular. Like, really popular.
A little too popular for my liking, in fact, given that most of my friends rib on me for avoiding anything approaching mainstream popularity like the plague. And yet, in a face-off between chino-pilled Gerald and pretentious third-person Gerald, guess which one prevailed?
Well, I’m wearing one of my two pairs of Giant-fit chinos as I type this. Had I been in the room to workshop the name, I might’ve pitched “big-ass chinos” or “hella-huge chinos”, but they’re not actually JNCO-sized. Instead, they’re cut with a proper wide-leg fit reminiscent of the ‘60s-era predecessors probably familiar to any vintage heads reading this. Thinking back to that era conjures a Pinterest board full of handsome dudes like Miles Davis or Marlon Brando wearing trousers that wouldn’t look out of place in a J.Crew ad today—higher-rise, roomier thighs, broader legs.
But the Giant-fit’s appeal goes deeper than surface-level looks. Its all-cotton twill fabric is dense with a satisfying snap to it, and it’s constructed with a level of attention on par with pants double the price, plenty of which I own. Way back when, I bought a pair of fancy Japanese repro chinos inspired by the same era—near-identical fit, astronomical price—and even their fabric hasn’t held up as well as J.Crew’s.
If you’ve got to run to another meeting or your coffee’s getting cold, you don’t need to sweat the details too much. Like I said before, all you really need to know is that the J.Crew Giant-fit chinos are great—so great, in fact, that they almost never go on sale. (For $98, they’re a wild deal to begin with.) But if you’ve made to the end of my taller-than-necessary explainer, you deserve a little treat—and today, that treat comes in the form of a 30% discount on the pants I’m wearing right this very second. Skedaddle over to J.Crew’s site to buy your own pair while the deal lasts.
