Rick Owens Tecuatl Track Pant

Tecuatl is not a marketing word. It is a family name from Owens’s Mexican side, taken from his mother’s line, and it gave its title to a collection built around that inheritance: Puebla, Mixtec ancestry, a Californian upbringing on the near side of a border his family crossed. For a designer whose public register is monumental and impersonal, attaching that name to a garment is about as close to autobiography as the label gets.

The garment itself is deliberately humble, which is the part that makes it interesting. A track pant in cotton jersey with three percent elastane is the least ceremonial thing in the line. It is soft, it is easy, it is the trouser you would actually put on. The zip detailing is the only piece of hardware and it is the one place the house’s harder vocabulary shows through.

Putting the most personal name in the house on the most ordinary garment in it is either an accident or the most Owens decision imaginable, and having looked at a great deal of his work we do not think it is an accident. The clothes that carry the most meaning are rarely the ones on the runway.

Why we selected it

We bought this because it is genuinely worn. The track pant comes back into rotation week after week rather than waiting for an occasion, and a store that only sells the extraordinary is not much help to anyone getting dressed on a Tuesday. The name is the second reason, and we would not carry it half as happily if the story behind it were invented.

Owens’s line runs from monumental tailoring to the plainest jersey, and the Tecuatl pieces sit at the plain end while carrying more of his own history than anything else he makes.

Materials and construction

Ninety-seven percent cotton and three percent elastane, in a soft jersey. Made in Italy, in Black. Zip detailing.

Fit notes

Cotton jersey with a small amount of elastane relaxes across a day and recovers with washing, so a track pant that feels exact in the morning and easy by evening is behaving normally. It is a soft trouser and it will read closer to the body than a woven one of the same nominal size. Take your usual size.

Styling

With a plain tee and a heavy sneaker, which is the honest answer. Under a long coat with a boot it becomes considerably more serious, and the zips are what let it carry that. It is the piece to travel in.

Care

Wash cool, inside out, and dry low or hang. Heat is what kills the elastane and the colour both, and black jersey in particular fades from friction and from the dryer more than from washing. Our care guidance covers the general principles.

Related pieces

We would point to the Drawstring Long, the Cargo Long, and the Bolan Banana Pants. Everything we currently hold from Rick Owens is listed together.