This review has been a long time coming, with the Kinetic Pant being something I have had my eye on for quite a while, but never got around to testing. They always seemed too technical, or too expensive, when I compared them to every other offering out there. I recently picked up a pair and have been testing them for a little over a month — I shouldn’t have waited so long to get them.

Material

The material on these is pretty straightforward at ‘100% Primeflex® Warp-knit Japanese Polyester’. That’s entirely useless, because these pants are so much more than that. First there’s an immense amount of four way stretch in the pants, so much so that I would say you will likely not experience restricted movement because of these pants.

Next, the material is not a smooth fabric like you might expect from polyester. Instead the material as a slight knit look to it, which gives the fabric nice visual texture.





The hand feel is soft, but not smooth. And there is a very slight sheen to the entire pant, not enough to be concerned with, but it does exist. Thankfully, the pants move silently.

Performance

One word: extraordinary. These are easily the most comfortable pants I own, and not even with the caveat of them being office friendly. Just hands down the most comfortable. They have a ton of stretch which keeps them moving comfortable, but also means they sit comfortably on your waist no matter what position you find your self stuck sitting in.

In addition to that they are highly breathable, and I found them comfortable in very warm weather. From a performance standpoint there is nothing I would change about them. Add to that the clever rubber dots on the inside of the waistband, which hold a tucked in shirt in place, well thought out.

There are two performance downsides with these pants:

Wrinkles do exist. They are advertised as not wrinkle resistant, but rather that wrinkles fall out quickly with your own body heat. I think that’s accurate. I found that packing them will cause creases, but that those creases are super easy to get rid of. In daily wear I did not encounter the pants getting wrinkled, even when sitting in cramped quarters with them on. Lint and hair is an issue with these. The fabric will seek out and suck in any hair and lint around you. Not so bad that they look terrible, but bad enough that it drives me nuts. And while on many of my other pants the hair will just brush off with my hand, here it sticks to the particular knit in these pants. You’ll want to have lint rollers on hand with these. This is the worst attribute of these pants.

Fit & Style

Ministry does an overall very good job at offering a wide ranges of sizes. I found the fit and style to be solid, but nothing too trendy. The cut is great, and in the past you had to have the pants hemmed as they all came very long, but now it appears Ministry is shipping them with hemmed lengths as well. This is great, and really makes these pants an easier buy.

I think the only downside on these pants from a style perspective is that the colors are a little off. While this navy color looks nice and plays well with most things, it is a stronger blue than you might want. I would love to see what the gray heather looks like in person.

Overall

So here’s the thing with these, they are really great, but have some off trade offs. For one I don’t think they dress down nearly as well as Futureworks (our review, but I do think they dress up far better than Futureworks. For me, there’s no better office pants than these Kinetic pants. They are more durable than the Velocity (our review) offering from Ministry and more comfortable than Futureworks.

However, for travel, I prefer the Futureworks as dirt and lint brushes off that fabric far better. I will also point out that the Kinetic pants do try a touch faster than Futureworks.

If you owned one pair of Futureworks and one pair of Kinetic pants, you would probably be set for every activity you pursue in life. I can tell you that these Kinetic pants have become my most worn pants to the office.

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