‘Hammer time’ at WSJ

This isn’t the kind of thing I would normally pay attention to, but while waiting for a fax this morning I glanced at a pile of Wall Street Journals and saw this front-page story from last Friday about harem pants. From a non-fashion perspective it is just a hilarious read, starting with the classic WSJ hed and dek:

Ridicule Keeps Fans of Harem Pants From Getting Too Big for Their Britches
* * *Slaves to Anti-Fashion Suffer Taunts of ‘Hammer Time,’ Bike Accidents

And these two wonderful grafs:

A radical departure from the skinny-pants trend of the past few years, the baggy trousers can take some getting used to. Jean Hall, 24, says the low-slung crotch of her American Apparel African-print harem pants got caught on her bike pedal while she was riding through Brooklyn, causing her to fall off. Her friend, who was riding with her, wrote about the incident on Twitter.

“Everyone has something to say about them,” Ms. Hall says. Recently she was chased down the street by a bunch of young boys in her neighborhood who were fascinated with the pants.

But what really clinches it is the hedcut, which you don’t see in the online version of the story (sorry for poor iPhone photo quality):

Now, if you google “harem pants” you get 363,000 hits, including stories at Vogue and MSNBC, so this is nothing new. But this must be like what non-music nerds feel when they stumble upon a piece about Grizzly Bear and/or Dirty Projectors and just think, “What the...?”