Since I'm a blogger and therefore a modern thought-leader type, my favorite maker of pants sent me some new-model pants in the mail.
I should explain now why I have been wearing "5.11 Tactical" trousers for a decade. It's pretty simple: before that time, I wore commonplace black jeans, for two decades. Jeans and tactical pants are the same school of garment. They're both repurposed American Western gear. I'm an American and it's common for us to re-adapt our frontier inventions.
Jeans were created for gold-grubbing miners while 5.11 Tactical pants were originally mountain-climber gear. American work and play, basically. They're both ruggedized, functional outdoor clothing that has been repurposed for the everyday.
Around the year 2000, I transformed from a writerly guy who took a lot of notes into a writerly guy who took a lot of notes, travelled a lot, and also carried lots of gadgets. My old-school jeans just couldn't handle my digitized commensal devices. The camera, the mobile, the city maps, the keys, pens, notebooks; when you live on the road that "daily carry" intensifies.
Tacticals, in the meantime, left the legs of the mountaineering community, and, thanks to certain members of the Colorado FBI, became the favorite pants of federal cops. I'm by no means a cop, but I was never a miner or a mountaineer, either.
The daily clothing needs of street cops are in fact pretty close to the daily clothing needs of street-wandering journalists with a big yen for tech devices. Cops haul around a lot of specialized belt gear, they're in and out of cars, bikes, whatever, they're commonly reacting to sudden opportunities, they alternate bursts of action with a lot of bureaucratic somnolence and the filling-out of forms… Cops are also intimidating tough-guys who project an 'atmosphere of deterrence,' but that machismo doesn't come out of their pants. It comes out of their hats, badges, sunglasses, pistols and clubs. I don't wear those. I wear bifocals and Missoni ties.
And I wear cop pants. For years now. Nobody minds, comments, or even notices. Since I need my gadgets at hand every day, I rarely wear anything else. I've tried a variety of cop pants, created by different cop suppliers. Most are, to tell the truth, not as well-thought-through as 5.11 Tactical garments.
There are cheaper ones; but the stitching is loose and the fabric is inferior; you get what you pay for. There are huge varieties of civilian "cargo pants," but they lack reinforced stitching on the stress points and they're poorly engineered. Their ergonomics are bad and they wear out quickly. 5.11 Tacticals also age with time: the fabric fades and the hems fray. However, I've never once torn them, and never lost a crucial item from their pockets. That counts for a lot.
There is also some boutique, high-performance, all-weather performance gear in the world, the awesome tactical spook clothing that's alluded to in contemporary William Gibson novels. I share my colleague's interest in that stuff. I don't design clothes like he does, but I fully understand why it's so very interesting. I wouldn't want to wear it, personally. I'm just a novelist. I don't need that much baroque functionality out of my pants. It's overkill.
Now down to the design-critic brass tacks. I'm currently wearing the new 5.11 Tactical "Stryke" trousers. Frankly, I like them less than the earlier pants that I've worn for ten years. That's because I'm so entirely used to the other ones. These new ones do have some definite advantages.
1. My wife likes them better. She has to watch me every day as I clank around in my full-duty cop gear, pulling phones and cameras off my baggy thighs. She remarks that I look slimmer and more dignified now. Pleasing a spouse should properly be a big deal in one's clothing choices.
2. The "Stryke" is made of an advanced fabric. This cotton-poly blend has got some elastic in it, it's thinner, it's glossier, the black color is richer in tone, it hangs closer to the body and it sheds stains and dirt more effectively. It looks like civilized office-wear. It's quieter.
3. The cargo pockets have interior pockets. These hold gadgets closer to the body so that the silhouette is reduced. The devices sway less and are less likely to get cracked in taxi doors.
4. These new pants lack the slightly fetishistic oddities that always marked traditional 5.11 pants. They have no metal D-ring on the front, which was supposedly for dangling cop-badges, or keys, or tear-gas, or RFID tags; I've never seen any cop that actually uses this D-ring. I never did.
Also gone missing is the legendary 5.11 "utility strap" on the back right hip. Supposedly, mountaineers were supposed to hang carabiners off this strap; it's a vestige of athletic life that somehow adorned the police force. In real life, this "utility strap" was something like "puttees" – everybody has heard about "puttees" and has some vague notion that they must have been para-militarily useful for something-or-other. But they weren't, which is why they're extinct now. I wore 5.11 Tacticals for ten years and never once was my nifty "utility strap" ever utilized for anything. In these new pants they're entirely gone, and no sane designer would ever think to stick them back on. I miss them a lot.
Older 5.11s feature some teensy loops in the cuffs where you can slip in some paracord and cinch them ankle-tight for mountain-climbing. Those atavistic holes are gone now. Not a major loss unless you're the kind of "chairborne ranger" who imagines himself surviving through "paracord."
5. Since the pants are mildly elastic, the elastic sides that used to wrinkle the interior belt are gone. They pants now lack that odd, exercise-pant waist snugness that the older model had.
6. The pocket flaps, which close with crunchy Velcro patches, seem just as secure, but are markedly more slender and less stiff. The older flaps tended to wrinkle and protrude a bit.
7. There are some new mini-pockets in front. I haven't yet found any use for them. I don't like them much.
In summary, these are high-tech, civilianized 5.11s. They're calmer, they're more elegant, they look more corporate, and they could likely pass muster in a wider variety of urban social situations. Few would imagine these pants to be police gear. They've preserved the most of the earlier, baton-swinging functionality while gentling-down the look.
With all that said, I prefer the old ones. I'm used to the way they behave, and that thicker, uglier, clumsier fabric is comforting once you get used to it. It was meant for abrasion on some granite cliff-face, so there's a body armor aspect to it. In old-school 5.11s, you could leave a car, ramble across a wet field, dodge through a barbed wire fence or two, manage some weeds and thorns, emerge on a distant street, find a nice cafe and behave as if nothing had happened. With these new, sleeker, slimier, thinner trousers, you'll look better after that adventure, but the skin will take more pain. It's a trade-off. It always is.
In conclusion: I'm conservative, and these pants are modern. I may be so conservative now that I'll continue to wear tactical pants, even when they're as archaic as puttees. My customary tech devices are becoming so thin and slender that there's no reason to make any bank-vault fuss about carrying them. The devices I treasured may even vanish entirely, as Alan Kay once prophesied. Gone, into walls and furniture.
In which case, I'll probably be wearing tactical pants for the sake of my dentures, hearing aids, spectacles, "longevity" quack cyberpunk vitamins, and similar geezer knickknacks. Strange to surmise that the rugged gear of mountain-climbers should somehow evolve into support garments for the elderly – but, well, mountain-climbing thrill seekers do tend to die young. Why should they get any say about what happens next?
