A post on X claimed to be a simple message from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Stay active; eat well. But the 90-second video it shared, called “Secretary Kennedy and Kid Rock’s Rock Out Work Out,” seems designed to be bewildering. Here was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eating steak and doing preacher curls in his belted blue jeans and a pair of hiking shoes; and here he was again, stripping off his T-shirt to ride an exercise bike inside a sauna; and here he was a little later, strutting over to a cold-plunge tub (still in his blue jeans but with the belt removed); and here he went into the tub, sliding underwater in his dungarees.
Why was the HHS secretary bathing in a pair of pants? The video never provides an answer for this question, even as Kennedy plays pickleball, then mugs for the camera, then soaks in a Jacuzzi with a glass of milk, all while still in jeans. It’s just bizarre—a PSA that presumably has been dialed in by his staff to maximize its WTF effect. (The video has been viewed more than 13 million times and produced some 11,000 replies; HHS did not respond to a request for comment about the video or the jeans.) However his peculiar gymwear habit started, its present state is very clear: The secretary’s jeans are self-aware.
Kennedy’s proclivity for working out in belted denim long predates the knowing wink with which it’s now displayed. Take the summer’s “DOD-HHS Fitness Challenge,” for which Kennedy donned his favorite workout gear and did a bunch of pull-ups with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Or the viral clip of him from 2023, wearing jeans and boots and nothing else, squeezing out a final set on Venice Beach. I don’t believe that these show a man who lifts in jeans to maximize his clicks. I believe that they show instead a man who fits a waning archetype in fitness culture, a species that has for decades been endemic to the gym: Kennedy is a jeans guy.
I’ve worked out, off and on, for more than 30 years—and for all of that time, the jeans guys have remained a steady presence on the rubber floors. They are sometimes taciturn, sometimes chatty. They often pair their jeans with boots, as Kennedy will do, and with a T-shirt or a tank top or a hoodie. But lest you think he simply has no truck with any gym-specific gear, the jeans guy is sometimes spotted wearing padded lifting gloves, or a leather lifting belt across his Levi’s. At times, his social role will overlap with that of other weight-room regulars, not least of which is the gym grandpa, who hangs around and shoots the breeze and doles out tips on how to lift. However he appears, and however much he gabs, the jeans guy’s social status is the same: He’s an outsider. Rarely does one find a jeans guy paired up with a workout partner. “It’s usually like, ‘The jeans guy rides alone,’” Tolga Ozyurtcu, a historian of physical culture at the University of Texas at Austin, told me when I called him up to talk about this phenomenon.
Not everyone enjoys the company of the jeans guy. Some see him as a threat. Planet Fitness once made a point of banning denim in the gym, along with grunting, dropping dumbbells, and judging others. (Those who broke these rules could be punished with a “lunk alarm” and summarily kicked out.) But this discrimination feels as ill-considered as it is unfair: In my experience, jeans guys are harmless at the very worst, and at best, they add some needed color to a dreary landscape. In this way, the jeans guys are akin to other gentle curiosities, such as the shorts guys who alight on college campuses in wintertime, and the black chipmunks that scamper by from time to time in city parks.
What motivates the jeans guy? No one knows. He is, if nothing else, as inscrutable as a four-leaf clover. Ask him why he isn’t wearing shorts, and he will likely tell you that he chooses denim for efficiency. When Fox News’s Jesse Watters asked Kennedy in August to explain his favored workout gear, all Watters got was this: “Well, I just started doing that a long time ago because I would go hiking in the morning and then I’d go straight to the gym, and I found it was convenient, and now I’m used to it.” In the hope of getting more, I reached out to Ryan Calder, the fitness coach who spotted Kennedy on the incline bench in that viral video from 2023. Did Calder—who at the time was dressed, quite reasonably, in shorts—happen to ask Kennedy about his denim pants and boots? He did. “I asked him right then, you know, like, ‘So, you’re banging it out in jeans?,’” he told me. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, man, this is my efficient way. I only have 30 minutes. I don’t spend time changing clothes.”
A jeans guy’s self-report must be taken with a grain of salt—maybe even he cannot really fathom why he lives the way he does. Kennedy’s is no exception to this rule. In public appearances, he is almost always in a suit and skinny tie, so adding a daily interlude in workout denim would hardly seem to be a way of saving time. His habit may be instead a product of the workout culture he imbibed during his youth. “The jeans guy, it’s a thing. It’s a very definitive thing,” Conor Heffernan, a fitness historian at Ulster University, told me. “It’s a trope we’ve had since the ’80s.” The power lifters of the time, some of whom were connected to the biker subculture, adopted a “rugged, spit-and-sawdust aesthetic” in the gym, he said. This included denim. During the same period, glitzy photoshoots for bodybuilders also featured jeans, to match the styles of the time. Heffernan brought up a famous photo of Lee Haney, the eight-time Mr. Olympia, flexing shirtless in a pair of jeans above a steamy manhole cover in New York City. Perhaps the older jeans guys of today—Kennedy himself is 72—are nothing less than living fossils.
Their aesthetic may have faded out, but a younger set of jeans guys—ironic jeans guys—has since emerged in the fitness culture. Take the influencer-marathoner Truett Hanes: His brand is built on running very fast and very far … in jeans. He claims that this started as a goof, but it has turned into a business. He now represents a denim company, as well as a chafing cream. The idea of working out in jeans, partly silly and partly serious, is everywhere once you start to look for it. One gymwear brand, Raskol, launched a line of lifter jeggings in 2023 in shades such as “blue steele” and “pale thunder,” with a tongue-in-cheek campaign that had bodybuilders boasting of their pride at using PEDs—that is, “performance-enhancing denims.”
This self-mocking move may be just the prelude to a fuller jeans-guy renaissance, Heffernan suggested. After all, Raskol’s jeggings did sell out, he said. And this wouldn’t be the first time that a traditional signifier of masculinity crept back into mainstream culture by way of performative half jokes. The fashion for bushy beards, and beards’ association with authentic manliness, has followed this same trajectory from irony to earnestness during its various resurgences since the early 19th century. Now the same could be happening to denim workout pants: Today’s goof evolves into tomorrow’s masculine ideal. “I think irony moves into fashion very quickly in fitness,” Heffernan said.
For Kennedy, this process may appear to be going in reverse: His latest workout video shows that he’s in on the joke, that in 2026 he’s capable of pumping irony as well as iron, and that he can engage in what Heffernan described as “a very deliberate deployment of jeans.” But it also shows that there is a recipe, if not a cultural machinery, for rehabilitating out-of-date ideas. Not all of Kennedy’s eccentricities are as quaint as how he dresses in the gym, and there are many ways of going backwards in pursuit of health while pretending that you’ve found a way into the future. MAHA is nostalgia, sometimes with a smirk. The jeans guy dunks himself in water. The jeans guy is reborn.
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