Outlier ladies' Daily Riding Pants vs. jeans vs. water. Fight!

I have, in large part, stopped wearing jeans. I still own a couple of dark-wash pairs that I cycle into my wardrobe when a very specific kind of dressy-casual calls for it, but my new go-to trousers are a handful of pairs of pants made by a company called Outlier, most of which are a product they call Women’s Daily Riding Pants. These pants are expensive, but they are a technical-pant product that neither looks, nor feels, like a technical-pant product, and they are so enjoyable to wear that I’ve abandoned the signature garment of modern times. Yeah. That good.

Outlier, a clothing startup that operates mainly online, sells garments that are intended as hybrid business-casual/cycling/athletic wear. Its line of men’s stuff is much more extensive, with several types of pants and shirts, and only recently has the company expanded beyond two pairs of pants into more women’s wear.

Outlier is hardly the first company to target technical, athletic-intended garments, but they skew more toward looking like normal clothes than most I’ve seen. Most technical pants out there are stiff, swishy, shiny, or all three, with patch or zipper pockets, burlap-like polyester fabric, and tear-away sections every few inches. Outlier clothes, or at least the pants, look incredibly normal—the dungaree varieties can even be mistaken for jeans—but they fit and move better than anything else I’ve worn.

Some of this is attributable to the pants’ construction—they’re cut beautifully and tend to have extra room, fabric, or stretch in areas where cyclists need them (the shirts have extra, barely noticeable fabric in the shoulders, for instance, and the pants tend to be cut higher in the back to prevent… you know). But a lot of the utility and comfort comes from the choice of fabric, which is superior to denim in a lot of ways.



My favorite pants, the women’s daily riding pants, are constructed of Doubleweave Twill, which can stretch in four directions. The fabric is coated with a Nano Sphere treatment created by Schoeller, a textile company that focuses mainly on fabric for weatherproof wear.

According to Schoeller, textiles have a naturally smooth surface, giving dirt, water, and other liquids a large surface area to adhere to. Nano Sphere is a silicon finish that, on a microscopic level, roughens the surface of the fabric and creates a “structured ‘hilly’ surface” that makes it difficult for materials thrown at it to be absorbed. After I walk in the rain, most rain droplets bounce off or bead up. But because of the light weave of the pants, even fully soaked ones dry in about an hour, as shown in the video above.

Schoeller’s coating used to only be applied to synthetic fabrics and was primarily used in garments like parkas. A material change back in 2005 allowed for the Nano Sphere treatment to be used on natural fabrics, too. Outlier’s other pants, like the 60/30 Chinos (60 percent cotton, 30 percent polyester) are also Nano Sphere-coated.

These fabric and design features make these pants great for road warriors—they generally stay clean and are resistant to smell and dirt. Most substances you spill on them can be brushed off. They don’t stretch nearly as much as jeans over the course of several wears. They’re also cooler than jeans in the summer, and though they’re thin, they’re about as warm as jeans when it’s cold out. Despite the fact that the women’s pants are pretty form-fitting, the stretch in the fabric means I can still wear them over long johns.

Outlier asserts that their pants are not prone to some of the problems that arise from biking in jeans, like holes from fabric worn out by repeated rubbing. But I like them just as much because they don’t have some of the problems that the supposedly ultra-comfortable jeans have: when I sit, the crotch doesn’t bind up, the waistband doesn’t cut in, and the fabric in the knees doesn’t clench my skin when I cross my legs.



The pants also don’t wrinkle easily, and what wrinkles you get will relax once you put the pants on. The sheer sitting-still comfort in these pants means that, since obtaining a pair in December, they have been my first and last choice for travel wear for every plane, train, car, and bus ride I’ve taken since.

The pants are heart wrenchingly expensive, generally around $200 for most pairs. As someone who only recently made peace with spending more than $25 on jeans and spends more time than is reasonable sewing up holes in cheaply made $8 shirts from H&M or Forever 21, these are nigh-painful to justify (though I did get a couple of pairs at an “as-is” sale of prototypes, one-offs, and remainders). But since they wear so well between washings, remain in great condition, and are so far beyond even jeans in terms of comfort and style, I can say definitively this is a technical-pants relationship that will last a lifetime.