I thought I had a revelation about why people sag their pants when I saw a teenager crossing the street the other day. The teenager wore a huge puffy black jacket, making his head look quite small, and sagging pants that started just bellow the jacket.

Immediately, my mind jumped to an image of a gorilla walking upright. I mentally compared the gorilla to the teenager and his attire. The comparisons I noted where that they both have very short legs, both walk in a manner where they are too top heavy and have to sway from side to side, and lastly there upper body was much larger than their lower half. With these observations I formed a hypothesis that people sagging their pants, men in particular, were trying to look like large silver back gorillas.

With my hypothesis formed, I hopped on the web to find facts that would substantiate my claim. After browsing though hundreds of images I found a picture of a gorilla and of a person sagging and put them side-by-side for a direct visual comparison.

After looking at some more images I went hunting for some hard facts. I would have liked to say the facts I found were astounding and merited being published in a scientific journal, but they fell short of the mark. As it turns out, people sag as a fashion statement that is derived from the United States prison system. Apparently suicide is quite prevalent in prison and belts are commonly used to take ones life. Hence the prisoners have a hard time keeping their pants from falling down. So instead of emulating the strong and noble gorilla, people would rather be associated with inmates, prisoners, and hoodlums. Who knew?

Maybe it was the puffy black jacket that turned me on to gorillas. Or maybe it was the mist. At any rate I thought the gorilla hypothesis had some potential.