It didn’t take much for RCR Khomenko’s pants to turn my head. And to be fair, they turned everyone else’s too. “Yo, mami, I love your pantaloooons!” a leather-clad biker screams to me as I walk to work in the cartoonish, cropped trousers. “Thanks, man!” I call back. A few blocks away, a young tourist asks to take a photo of me—specifically, my legs—and I cheerily strike a pose. I’m halfway to my desk when two of my colleagues leap up, pointing at my lower hemisphere with exclamations of sartorial love and desire. When I go to pick up lunch, one of the salad bar employees cheers, “I love that team!” pointing to the emblazoned logo across my ankles and making a hockey-stick swinging motion. I skip out like a child, practically beaming.
First, keep in mind that my preferred trouser shade varies along a gray scale. These pants are anything but gray: quasi-motocross-inspired, similar to the bad-ass, logo-heavy trousers from Marc by Marc Jacobs for fall 2014 these are red, white and blue and regularly mistaken for promotional garb from The New York Rangers hockey team, largely due to a grapefruit-size Rangers logo at the hem. Much to what I imagine would be that salad bar employee’s chagrin, the pants actually have their roots across the Atlantic: Their colors and insignia are from the Rangers Football Club, a Glasgow-based soccer team. The Ukrainian designer Yasya Khomenko created the trousers out of children’s sheets and curtains procured on a trip to London. After showing them at London Fashion Week in her spring 2014 collection, a photo of the runway look quickly ended up on message boards for soccer enthusiasts. Responses ranged from one user’s succinct “WTF” to another’s calm retrospection: “That is made out of a Rangers bedspread. My wee boy has that set.”
A few months later, more than 1,800 miles away from Glasgow, I visited Khomenko’s apartment turned showroom in Kiev. Khomenko, whose collection was inspired by children’s play clothes (“I just wanted to make costume superheroes from home textiles,” said Khomenko) discovered the sporty curtains at a London bazaar. They were loud. They were reminiscent of an infant’s pajamas. They were very far off from my uniform of black skinny jeans and gray tops. And yet? I had to have them. I bought the trousers, took my first step out of a monochromatic wardrobe box, and I haven’t looked back yet—sometimes, all it takes is the right pair of trousers to make wearing something out of the ordinary mere child’s play.
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