Mike Hosking wakes in his penthouse apartment atop the most exclusive high-rise in Auckland’s CBD. He is the first to rise, but he is not alone. All around there are ten to twenty people of varying familiarity to him, including several strangers passed out drunk and someone he probably used to smoke with in high school. There is a mostly eaten pizza cushioning his personal assistant’s comatose head and there is vomit on his special snakeskin shoe rack. As always, he is not wearing any pants. He rolls over some half-dead... is that the guy from Dominoes? “No matter,” he thinks, “he looks about my size.” As he struggles to fit his legs into the teenager’s jeans, he slips and falls into an expertly placed jar of mayonnaise. The pants are now stained white around the crotch and the zip of the fly has broken. ‘”Never mind!” He barks out into the silent room. “Zips are for kink freaks and commies anyway!” He slouches over to a mirror and straightens his shirt collar before achieving the mildest of smiles. “Hi there New Zealand.”
Or at least, this is how I imagine Mike Hosking’s average morning begins. For those of you familiar with TV One’s Seven Sharp, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. It’s not clear if it’s just one, or multiple pairs of similarly disgraced jeans. How many suspiciously stained, chain-clad denims can one man own? I’m probably being very generous for imagining they must be the result of some kind of accident. That happened at a party. With other… Humans. But no, I fear these pants look exactly as intended, and were bought with Mike’s own hard won cash.
Let’s get something straight: unless your name is Mike Hosking, I have no beef with your pants and I’m sure you look great, fam. But if your name is Mike Hosking, I think there is actual beef on your pants and your family is embarrassed. I’d like to think that I’m okay with recognising certain subcultures and styles, but I’m struggling to categorise Mike or give him the benefit of the doubt. Which tribe of hard-rockin’, lean sipping dudes present with unbuttoned slim-fits, on live television?
Indigenous tribes of North America have traditionally painted their bodies before battle. Warriors would paint their clothes with designs symbolising their achievements. I’m not sure if this is what Mike’s going for with the pants, but if it is – I really don’t want to know what they symbolise. Players in America’s NFL smear black paint under their eyes. This has been proven to reduce glare from bright lights, and help the athletes focus on the game at hand. Mike’s pants have an opposite effect: drawing thousands of New Zealanders’ eyes towards his crotch region, distracting (possibly to his benefit) from anything coming out of his mouth. And the seemingly open fly? We have been granted a front-row, all-access pass to a man’s very public midlife crisis. This is what is so confusing: for all of the centre-right talk, ‘common sense’ and putting down anyone left of St John the Capitalist, the pants look like Anarchy in its most succinct form. It seems that if Mike Hosking saw Mike Hosking on TV, he would subsequently go on TV and tell himself to get back into the sewer with the other national embarrassments.
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m the old fogey wearing pants he doesn’t understand. Time will tell I suppose, but in the meantime I will continue roasting the pants. The pants look like a gigolo Halloween costume. The pants look like Kid Rock’s sofa. Damn pants look like a Jackson Pollock painting and Blink182 went through that machine from The Fly. They look like someone who owns birds as pets. Dogs bark at the pants when they see them. The pants are on the poster of banned items at the airport. Rowdy ass pants are lowering property values.