The Company Making $860 Stretch Pants Feel Indispensable

The women’s work-pants hall of fame has its first postpandemic inductee: High Sport’s “Kick” cropped knit pants. The independent New York and Los Angeles brand was launched in 2021, but its luxurious, smoothing, stretchy trousers already have a zealous following. For the fashionable and well-resourced women who whisper brand names to each other in line for desk salads, or at school pickups from Pasadena’s Polytechnic to Manhattan’s Spence, these cult pants are apparently worth their $860 price tag. 

“Every chic person on social media wears them,” said Kristen Fealy, a 55-year-old New York City stay-at-home mom, who began chasing the pants after she first spotted them on designer (and Grey Gardens resident) Liz Lange’s Instagram in 2022. They’re favorites of fashion-obsessive types like Laurel Pantin and Leandra Medine Cohen, who extol their virtues in their respective newsletters. (High Sport says it very rarely gifts influencers.)