Walton Goggins’s Low-Rise Skinny Jeans Are Partying Like It’s 2011

In the recently concluded third season of The White Lotus, Walton Goggins made the jump from beloved character actor to full-blown breakout star. Fans fell hard for his character Rick Hatchett’s curmudgeonly sex appeal, Hunter S. Thompson-esque tropical shirts, and star-crossed May-December romance with the optimistic Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood)—not to mention Goggins’s own alluringly distinctive hairline.

And while—spoiler!—things didn’t fare quite as well for Rick, Goggins now has an exciting new career chapter ahead of him. That said, it may take a bit for his off-duty wardrobe to catch up.

When Goggins made a post-finale stop at The Drew Barrymore Show earlier this week, he wore an outfit that wouldn’t have looked so out of place in, say, the GQ offices circa 2008-2015: a tan wool coat, a half-buttoned white dress shirt, and low-rise, sandblasted skinny jeans, whose rolled-up cuffs showcased the actor’s bare ankles (sorry, EmRata) and well-worn brown lace-up shoes. (His cool Jacques Marie Mage shades, though, were right on trend for 2025.)

But Goggins’s skinny jeans, as several of my most #menswear-minded colleagues immediately clocked, are a piece of menswear history. They are most likely the Petit Standard jeans by A.P.C., otherwise known as the most GQ-circa-2008-to-2015 jeans to ever exist. Back in the day, the running lore was that you were supposed to care for A.P.C. jeans by, uh, wearing them in the ocean and then rolling around in the sand. It’s true! (My editor, Yang-Yi Goh, even tried it himself on the shores of Long Island’s Jones Beach while in college.) Funnily enough, the brand still advises using this “seawater recipe” in the care section on its website, which goes as follows: “Let your jeans get dirty as long as possible, go swimming in the ocean wearing your jeans, rub them with dry sand and repeat several times. Rinse in fresh (not salt) water and let dry in the sun.”

In a cosmic sense, this lore naturally lends itself to the watery White Lotus universe. We can only hope that Goggins brought these jeans along with him to the beachside Four Seasons Koh Samui resort in Thailand, because his low-rise selvedge denim could definitely use a soak.

Anyways, speaking of 2000s-and-late denim, here’s a funny moment from Goggins’s oeuvre: in a 2011 episode of the Danny McBride-led HBO series Vice Principals, Goggins’s character Lee Russell chastises a couple of students who made fun of his starchy cuffed denim: “Uh, yes, look at my jeans. You wish you could afford them. They’re 7 For All Mankind.”