I Resisted the Ruti Pants for a Year. Now I Never Take Them Off.
Never has the roller coaster of prospective consumption — the magnetic pull of targeted ads, the resentment of those ads, the obsessive research — hit me so hard as it did with the On the Loose Work Pants, a garment made by a Bay Area–based brand called Ruti. Somewhat unremarkable at first glance, the pants are cut in a slimmer-fit barrel leg that is ever-so-slightly cropped.
I first learned of these pants two summers ago, when they were recommended enthusiastically by an interior-design influencer I follow. Her appraisal didn’t read like sponcon — I don’t think it was — and it lit up a lot of regions in my brain. I was a 37-year-old, work-from-home mom of a toddler, desperate to look good (or good enough) and feel at ease without wasting precious time, money, or energy. This particular influencer assured me that the Ruti pants would solve all my problems: uncannily flattering and comfortable while also elegant and nicely tailored in a breezy, indestructible fabric. The On the Loose pants could actually be worn to a gentle yoga class then a lunch meeting; while feeding yogurt to my daughter at home and then boarding a flight. At no point would I ever feel overdressed or slovenly.
I signed up for Ruti’s text alerts and added the pants to my cart before getting distracted, and I briefly stopped thinking about them. They are, after all, a pretty forgettable garment: Made of nylon and spandex, they’re on the dressier end of the nebulous athleisure category and look like something Lululemon or Alo might make. The $249 price tag is high, but not high enough to qualify them as a status garment like those other viral $860 High Sport pants. In that world of quiet luxury, the Rutis are more like discreet comfort. Online, they look pretty indistinguishable from hundreds of barrel pants I’ve scrolled past over the years — just more catnip for millennial moms.
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And yet they wouldn’t leave me alone. Once they came into my field of vision, the On the Loose Pants never left. There they were, in more targeted Instagram Stories and in banner ads on New York Times recipes. There they were, being recommended by influencers I followon Instagram and TikTok, each of them posting enthusiastically. “Why did I wait so long to buy these?” They’d wonder, followed by a reassurance that these pants are, in fact, as good everyone says. The pants got so popular that they inspired a slew of dupes, including a pair by Old Navy and another one by Amazon.
Usually when I want something that’s been advertised to me, I can wait out the urge and it’ll slip from my mind. Not these pants — I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Were they a feat of aggressive marketing or something more? So I called Ruti Zisser, the former tech executive whostarted her eponymous label 2009. She launched the brand with a boutique in Palo Altoand clothes abiding by three strict principles: It must be cool, it must be flattering, it must be practical. “I designed this brand for women basically 35 and up,” Zisser said.
About a decade ago, she began refining a pair of pants that would eventually become the On the Loose.They were based on a pair of barrel legs she’d discovered at a store in Japan. “I’ve loved barrel-leg pants for ten years,” Zisser told me, but the Japanese pair were cut so wide that most women couldn’t pull them off. Zisser and Ruti’s then-designer took those Japanese pants and gradually slimmed them down until they were a more accessible silhouette, then hunted for the perfect fabric. An earlier version was launched under a different name and slowly refined each year. By 2025, they had the perfect cut and fabric locked in. “We looked for the fabric for years,” Zisser said, describing a lightweight but substantive blend that drapes well and is not remotely shiny. That’s “what makes it so special,” she added. “Now that we have it, it’s basically our secret.”
In 2019, during a more innocent time of online marketing, Ruti caused a minor stir by using facial-recognition technology in its boutiques. According to a report by the website Glossy, customers who walked into any of Ruti’s nine stores would have their faces scanned by a set of cameras. These photos would be stored and indexed in Ruti’s marketing database, and if the customer returned to a store, the information would go to sales associates to help pull sizes and recommend styles. When I asked her about the technology’s impact, Zisser was vague but noted that it helped grow in-store sales “massively.” “Retail with no technology is not going to work,” Zisser explained. “The idea that the company doesn’t have all that information is insane.”
When I asked Zisser about the strategy used to market the On the Loose pants, she was more coy. “We are a brand that doesn’t spend so much money on marketing,” she explained. In the early days of On the Loose, the team relied heavily on gifting to content creators, with the goal of getting “user-generated content,” which does not involve official sponsorships. “We didn’t want to pay for advertising, so we just gifted,” Zisser said. A lot of brands do this, but it doesn’t always lead to the next viral hit.Here, though,“people fell in love with the pants.”
Early boosters included small and mid-level content creators who were just on the cusp of middle age, likewardrobe stylist Becca Kahane and Nashville blogger Michelle Tomczak, whotalked about the elegant practicality and versatility of the pants. Butsoon, their reach spread beyond the 35-plus crowd Zisser had always envisioned. “Right now, we’re finding out that a lot of younger women wear the pants,” Zisser said. “My daughter is 19, and she and her friends wear them.” By the end of last year, the On the Loose pants landed on thetop-100 most-recommended list published by ShopMy, the website through which most content creators manage their affiliate links.
I made it a full year without buying them, which felt like an exercise in durational impulse control. This past summer, though, I met up with a friend who is younger than me and who has very good taste. She was in town from London, and when we hung out, my eyes were instantly drawn to her pants, which were sporty but elegant, loungey but equipped to do some serious summer schlepping. When I asked her where she got them, she explained that they were “some Instagram brand” and contorted her body to check the name on the tag. Ruti. Here were the On the Loose Work Pants in the flesh. She owned multiple pairs. “I never wear anything else,” she said a bit sheepishly.
With that vote of confidence, I pulled the trigger and purchased my own — the basic black. I also bought the $30 Amazon version as a sanity check. The Amazon pair, with its thick, crinkly fabric, smelled like chemicals and made me look like I was wearing a summer snowsuit. The Ruti version, on the other hand, made me feel like myself. The flat waistband across the front helped me seem put-together, while the elastic in the back was forgiving. I’ve never liked cropped pants, but the ultraslight crop here made me feel like I could wear any shoe without worrying about the hem.
And that was the theme of the On the Loose pants: They let me stop thinking about what I was wearing, which feels like the ultimate luxury. I am only a little bit ashamed to admit that I’ve worn them almost every single day over the last month.
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