Malia Obama's comfort trousers make her Gen-Z androgynous style icon

Malia Obama's comfortable pants have been the cornerstone of her outstanding recent menswear-inspired ensembles — earlier in the year, she strolled around Los Angeles while wearing a grey zip-up hoodie, jaunty cinch-back canvas khaki trousers, and Mars Yards. 

Barack Obama's daughters, Malia and Sasha are known for being the first "social media presidents," so it's amazing that they have managed to keep their digital lives virtually completely private. 

Instead, we only get glitzy glimpses into their daily routines through tabloids.

Obama girls remain the first First Daughters whose post-White House lives are featured on TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and Daily Mail's endlessly scrollable webpages. 

Recently, on Twitter, users were nihilistically thrilled to see pictures of Malia Obama looking stylish and timeless—that is, smoking a cigarette and sporting a great pair of trousers.

Malia has been residing in Los Angeles since her graduation from Harvard in 2021. She most recently served as a writer for Swarm, Donald Glover's Beyhive-inspired television series. 

She was wearing high-waisted pleated wool trousers, lug-soled black boots, and an earth-toned cropped knit cardigan from the Australian company Kina & Tam, whose website characterises its general design concept as "dopamine dressing." 

The true stars of the show here, though, are the pants; in the words of my colleague Avidan Grossman at GQ, they're "one dart, two pleats, zero notes."

For a night out at Soho House, Y-Project hiking boots and green, raw-hemmed Assembly work trousers would look great. 

During a summer Whole Foods run, wear slouchy knee-length denim shorts and Patta x New Balance 990s trainers. In the meanwhile, Malia's younger sister Sasha is the only one responsible for the resurgence of giant Dickies dungarees as per Eileen Cartter from GQ.

Malia accessorised her waist-length braids, which were loose down her back, with two extremely modern objets de curiosités: a large, insulated Hydro Flask water bottle and a cigarette. 

The water bottle is sort of an essential accessory for Gen Z, but nicotine is the most iconic vice of all time. It may be called the duality of man, or simply a mirror of the general situation among the trendy young creative elite in image- and wellness-obsessed Los Angeles.

Writer Naomi Fry of the New Yorker said, "Obama's daughters smoking cigarettes is the return of monoculture," and she included herself in the piece. Time is a flat circle, so it appears that the Truth anti-tobacco movement of the 2000s has returned, and young people are enjoying smoking cigarettes once more. 

It's difficult to believe that evidence of the Bush twins smoking would have caused anything other than disaster even in their earlier years. Undoubtedly, the father of Malia and Sasha gained popularity when he gave off smoking more than ten years ago, citing his children as the primary motivators.

"Nothing beats watching your children become smarter and cooler than you are,” the former president unrelatedly told GQ in 2015. “And you suddenly will hear them say something or make a joke or have an insight and you go, ‘Wow. I didn’t think of that."