Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl
Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show. Photography: Getty Images

DON’T TURN THE TV off, at least not until you’ve caught up on Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show. Today, the Compton rapper transformed the Caesars Superdome into a 15 minute compilation of his greatest hits, but it wasn’t just his renditions of diss track ‘Not Like Us’ (controversial inclusion! He went there!) that had our eyes trained to the screen. No, it was the flared jeans clinging to Lamar’s upper thighs that left us wondering exactly what decade we’re in.

Up top, Lamar wore a custom bomber jacket bearing the logo of his creative agency pgLang on the back, and ‘GLORIA’ on the front – a reference to the closing track on his newest studio album GNX. Plus, plenty of bling (including a chain dripping with pgLang’s ‘a’ logo) and his trademark black flat cap. In the hours since his performance, it’s been confirmed that British independent designer Martine Rose worked with Lamar to produce the custom jacket.

And then there were the jeans. After being introduced by Samuel L. Jackson, in costume as Uncle Sam, Lamar took to the stage in a pair of light wash bootleg jeans that were so long and flared, they pooled beneath his sneakers. Among team Esquire, those jeans raised a few eyebrows. But then we found out they were Celine, and everything made sense.

Related:

Kendrick Lamar’s top 15 songs, ranked

The best Super Bowl halftime shows of all time, ranked

We know Lamar is a big fan of denim – he wore double denim by Maison Margiela in a similar wash to the 2025 Grammy Awards, where he scooped up no less than 5 gramophone-shaped statues. But the Margiela jeans were a straighter, more contemporary cut. The Celine pants he wore while rapping ‘King Kunta’ at the Bowl? They were a new and unexpected silhouette for the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist. While Hedi Slimane is no longer at Celine (in October last year, it was announced he’ll be replaced by Michael Rider in “early 2025”), there’s no way these ass-sculpting pants aren’t the work of Slimane.

Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show. Photography: Getty Images
In the words of fashion critic @thekimbino, “you could not pay for a better ass in them jeans.” Photography: Getty Images

Thoughts? Feelings? His thighs didn’t have a whole lot of breathing space, and it looked as if he needed to hike them up on a couple of occasions, but the cut matched the retro energy of his shell toe sneakers and varsity-style jacket. I’m not mad at it. The silhouette of the pants and sneakers actually reminds me of the kind of pants Pharrell has been peddling with his Adidas Superstars.

Stylist Taylor McNeill (who also works with Timothée Chalamet, and has been putting the actor in some pretty all-American retro threads lately) definitely chose a conversation-starter by putting Kendrick Lamar in these extremely flared jeans.

Big pants, squabble up. Flared bootlegs just came roaring back into the zeitgeist.