A post on X purports to be a simple message from the US Department of Health and Human Services: Stay active; Eat well. But the 90-second video posted, titled “Secretary Kennedy and Kid Rock at Rock Out Work Out,” appears to be designed to be confusing. Here was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eats steak and curls his hair while wearing belted blue jeans and a pair of hiking boots. And here he is again taking off his shirt and riding an exercise bike inside the sauna; And here he was a little later, strutting in a cold bathtub (still wearing blue jeans but with the belt removed); Here he entered the bathtub and slid under the water in his underwear.
Why was the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services showering in pants? The video never provides an answer to that question, even as Kennedy plays pickleball, turns toward the camera, and then dips into the Jacuzzi with a glass of milk, all while still wearing jeans. It’s quite bizarre, as he was supposedly contacted by his employees to maximize his WTF effect. (The video has been viewed more than 13 million times and generated about 11,000 responses; the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on the video or the jeans.) However his bizarre habit of wearing tracksuits began, his current state is very clear: the minister’s jeans are self-aware.
Kennedy’s penchant for working out in distressed denim long predates the knowing wink with which he is now displayed. Take the summer “DOD-HHS Fitness Challenge,” for which Kennedy donned his favorite gym gear and did a set of pull-ups with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Or the viral clip of him from 2023, wearing jeans and shoes and nothing else, preparing for the final shoot on Venice Beach. I don’t think these show a guy wearing jeans to maximize his clicks. I think it shows instead a man who fits a diminishing archetype in fitness culture, a genre that for decades has been endemic to the gym: Kennedy is mens jeans.
I’ve been working out on and off for over 30 years, and in all that time, denim men have been a constant presence on rubber floors. They are sometimes silent, sometimes talkative. They often pair jeans with shoes, as Kennedy does, and with a T-shirt, tank top, or hoodie. But lest you think he simply doesn’t have any gym equipment, the Jeans Man is sometimes seen wearing padded lifting gloves, or a leather lifting belt via Levi’s. At times, his social role overlaps with that of others who are regulars in the weight room, not the least of which Find a gymwho hangs out, shoots the breeze, and offers tips on how to lift. No matter how he looks, no matter how talkative, the Jeans Man’s social status is the same: he is an outsider. Rarely does one find a jeansman paired with a workout partner. “Usually it’s like ‘Jeans man rides alone,’” Tolga Ozyortko, a historian of physical culture at the University of Texas at Austin, told me when I called him to talk about the phenomenon.
Not everyone enjoys the company of a jeans man. Some see it as a threat. Planet Fitness once made sure to ban the wearing of jeans at the gym, along with grunting, dropping dumbbells and judging others. (Those who break these rules can be punished with a “lunch ultimatum” and then summarily expelled.) But this distinction seems as ill-considered as it is unfair: In my experience, denim men are harmless at worst, and, at best, add some much-needed color to an otherwise dreary landscape. In this way, denim men resemble other cute curiosities, such as sIt bothers men Who descend on campus in the winter, and black squirrels that wander from time to time in city parks.
What motivates the jeans man? Nobody knows. It is, if nothing else, as mysterious as a four-leaf clover. Ask him why he doesn’t wear shorts, and he’ll likely tell you that he chooses jeans for efficiency. When Fox News’ Jesse Watters asked Kennedy in August to explain his favorite workout equipment, all Watters got back was this: “Well, I just started doing it a long time ago because I used to do long walks in the morning and then go straight to the gym, and I found it comfortable, and now I’ve gotten used to it.” Hoping for more, I reached out to Ryan Calder, the fitness trainer who watched Kennedy on the incline bench in this viral video from 2023. Did Calder — who at the time was wearing reasonably short shorts — happen to ask Kennedy about his jeans and boots? He did. “I asked him at the time, you know, ‘So, are you wearing jeans?'” he told me. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah man, that’s my effective method. I only have 30 minutes. And I don’t spend time changing.’
The Jeans Man’s self-report should be taken with a grain of salt, and perhaps even he cannot truly understand why he lives this way. Kennedy is no exception to this rule. In his public appearances, he always wears a tight suit and tie, so adding a daily break in his denim workout gear doesn’t seem like a time-saver. His habit may instead be a product of the exercise culture he imbibed during his youth. “The jeans guy, it’s a thing. It’s a very specific thing,” Conor Heffernan, a fitness historian at Ulster University, told me. “It’s a trope we’ve had since the ’80s.” Weightlifters at the time, some of whom were associated with the biker subculture, adopted a “hard, spit-and-sawdust aesthetic” in the gym, he said. This included denim. During the same period, attractive photo shoots of denim bodybuilders also appeared, fitting the styles of the time. Heffernan posed a famous photo of eight-time Mr. Olympia Lee Haney, shirtless over a steamy manhole cover in New York City. Perhaps today’s older jeans men – Kennedy himself is 72 – are nothing less than living fossils.
Their aesthetic may have faded, but the younger set of jeans —sarcastic Men’s jeans – have since appeared in fitness culture. Take influential marathon runner Truett Hance: his brand is built on running very fast and very far…in jeans. He claims this started out as a goof, but it turned into a business. He now represents the denim company, as well as Chafing Cream. The idea of working out in jeans, which is partly silly and partly serious, is everywhere once you start looking for it. One sportswear brand, Raskol, launched a line of weightlifting pants in 2023 in shades like “Blue Steele” and “Pale Thunder,” with a satirical campaign that had bodybuilders proudly showing off their use of PEDs — i.e. “performance-enhancing denim.”
Heffernan suggested that this self-mocking move might just be a prelude to a more complete renaissance for men’s jeans. After all, Rascol’s pants were sold out, he said. This would not be the first time that a traditional indicator of masculinity has infiltrated mainstream culture through performative jokes. The fashion for bushy beards, and the association of beards with authentic masculinity, has followed this same path from irony to seriousness during its various renewals since the early nineteenth century. Now the same can happen with workout denim shorts: today’s goofiness evolves into tomorrow’s ideal masculine model. “I think sarcasm moves into fashion very quickly in the fitness space,” Heffernan said.
For Kennedy, the process may appear to be going in reverse: a recent video of the exercise shows that he is in on the joke, that in 2026 he is able to pump sarcasm as well as iron, and that he can engage in what Heffernan described as “a very deliberate sawing of jeans.” But it also shows that there is a recipe, if not a cultural mechanism, for rehabilitating outdated ideas. Not all of Kennedy’s eccentricities are as weird as the way he dresses at the gym, and there are plenty of ways back Back in the pursuit of health while pretending you’ve found a way to the future. MAHA is nostalgic, sometimes with a smirk. Jeans man immerses himself in water. The jeans man is reborn.
