Denim is traditionally 100 percent cotton, but mixing in 1 or 2 percent elastane (the generic name for Lycra or spandex) fibers gives jeans a softer feel and helps ease the adversarial relationship between the durable, rugged textile and tender bits of the human body. This particular fabrication is the relatively new result of advances in textile production, and it found its first home on the consumer market in the mid-2000s, when women’s fashion shifted its focus to skinny jeans and away from a more relaxed, boot-cut look. Women embraced the change quickly. You could be trendy and also be sitting down. It was a revelation.

Men, who saw fashion bend toward slim fits for them soon after it did for women, have been considerably more resistant to the change, which is what has prompted the euphemistic trickery from brands. For something as innocuous as slightly less restrictive pants, stretch jeans have caused a lot of hand-wringing among men’s-fashion types over the past couple of years. Much of it is bound up in what constitutes an appropriate performance of manhood, and whether suffering for fashion, something long considered a feminine burden, is something masculinity requires.

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In opposition to stretch jeans stood the popularity of selvedge denim, an old-fashioned manufacturing method whose stiff, rough product found an ardent following among menswear enthusiasts online that hit a fever pitch a few years ago—long after women had largely embraced the ability to painlessly sit down. According to Matt Sebra, the style director of GQ magazine, the popularity of selvedge required men to buy into an overtly masochistic idea of what it means to be authentic and masculine. “You get this stiff-ass pair of jeans and people would tell you, ‘Oh, wear them every day for six months and don’t wash them,’” Sebra says. “The first two weeks, you’d need the jaws of life to get out of them, and you were just sweaty and scratched up.”

Nancy Deihl, a professor of fashion history at New York University, echoed Sebra’s feeling that the slow embrace of elastane among men was at least in part the result of how it violated the belief that masculinity requires testing and achievement. “Stretch jeans go against ideas of male authenticity—the Marlboro Man image that jeans are supposed to have,” she says.

So, the thinking went, what if the jeans were no longer stretch—what if they were centered around the practical advantages of having a full range of motion?

There are two main ways that clothing companies have chosen to rebrand sitting comfortably as an activity for men. The first is recoding stretch denim as an aid in athletic performance, even though modern fashion jeans aren’t intended to be worn for anything resembling exercise. It’s difficult to parse what kind of rapid motion Banana Republic expects its customers to undertake in Rapid Movement denim, for example, but evoking ideas of athleticism is a common tactic for brands trying to make a case to men for a historically feminine product, according to Ben Barry, the chair of the Ryerson School of Fashion. Invoking athleticism also helps conjure the comfort and ease of athleisure, which is used in other parts of men’s fashion—dress shoes with flexible, cushioned soles, for example—to promise buyers a more casual experience in disguise.