This fashion designer wants to stuff your pants.
Chad Nazam is amassing a following in the online fashion world, thanks to his bizarre design.
Nazam, a 22-year-old Virginian who runs the brand Le Rêve Nazam, took perfectly good, wearable pants and sewed at least 200 stuffed animals onto the legs.
“In fashion, a lot of things are boring,” Nazam told the New York Times. “I’m able to kind of do what I want and be a little wrecking ball in the industry.”
And his $650 stuffed animal pants are certainly not boring.
“A lot of people dress the same,” Nazam noted, adding that he wants people to look at his clothes and think, “Wait, could I wear that?”
The Beanie Baby-like pants come complete with four pockets and weigh five pounds, according to the product listing.
But there’s no need to hit up Build-A-Bear to get the pants made — they are hand-sewn by a team of sewers, including Nazam’s 79-year-old grandmother.
If you’re concerned about how you’d sit in the beary poofed-up pants, don’t fret: the stuffed animals are only on the front.
Besides, the zhuzh zoo can serve as a cushion if you happen to take a fall.
“You could jump on your knees and you wouldn’t feel anything,” Nazam claimed.
And as with many bizarre fashion trends, celebrities are getting on board.
Wrestler Jade Cargill, Thai actress Araya Alberta Hargate and K-pop rapper BamBam have all worn Nazam’s fuzzy bottoms, which he says he did not send them for free.
Just a few weeks ago, DK Metcalf, a wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, wore the stuffed pants on a game day, which got folks talking.
“Everybody loves a good conversational piece, right?” Dani Hill, a Dallas-based stylist who started working with Metcalf last season, told the Times.
According to Hill, Metcalf already had the jeans in his closet but admitted to never having worn them. She picked them for him to wear coming out of the tunnel on game day because “you’re looking for something that sparks the eye.”
After seeing the football player wear the plush pants, Jason Bitton, a 35-year-old entrepreneur in Toronto, bought the pants and wore them courtside to a Toronto Raptors game — and all eyes were on him.
“I probably got stopped for eight or nine pictures,” he told the Times. As a bonus, Bitton’s 5-year-old daughter loved them, too.
“She was asking about different ones,” Bitton shared. “She was counting them at one point.”
Football players and entrepreneurs with courtside seats are the types of people likely to wear these eye-popping pants. “Someone who’s going to buy these is not just going to Walmart,” Nazam said.
However, that hasn’t limited his customer base.
The stuffed animal pants have been on sale since April, and Nazam said that he’s sold hundreds of pairs in the past year — and soon enough demand could outpace production.
While Nazam’s teddy bear pants are the hot thing on the internet, he wasn’t the first to come up with the idea.
A 27-year-old clothing designer in Las Vegas has been sewing mini stuffed animals onto pants since 2022.
Tierra Gray reached new heights when she put together a fully beared-up pair of pants with 1,300 plush animals — which took her four months to sew by hand, the Times reported. She sells her Mini Stuffed Animal Sweat Pants on her Etsy Page, PlanetSugaKush, for $350.
But she also sells other stuffed animal wearables on her Etsy, such as slippers, beanies, tote bags, earmuffs, bikinis, ski masks and more. She told the Times that in the past three years, she has sold 1,500 stuffed animal-covered items.
Nazam said that he had not seen Gray’s designs before designing his own — and he’s now made a professional business out of the craft.
