Justin Bieber Saved His Bieberiest Fit for the Last Gasp of 2023

Not too long ago, my colleague Gerald Ortiz made a bold proclamation: “Justin Bieber is our era’s best jeans-wearer.” This is a bit of an inside-baseball take: tracking Justin Bieber’s commitment to wearing ludicrously capacious and/or off-puttingly strange denim has become a favorite GQ pastime. Every time Bieber wears a new pair of outrageous pants, a GQ writer gets her selvedge wings. The bigger and baggier, the better.

On Tuesday, Bieber joined friends Jaden Hossler and Anastasia “Stassie” Karanikolaou for a rainy-night dinner at the upscale Italian restaurant Funke in Beverly Hills. (This is one of the Biebers’ favorite spots—and for those keeping track, it’s the same locale where J.B. recently wore one of his coolest outfits in years.) He wore an exemplary—even superlative—Bieber ensemble for the occasion: a powder blue Nahmias hoodie (a size too big), a shredded-to-hell pair of light-wash jeans (many sizes too big), and socks with open-toed, traffic-cone-orange foam slides. He tied a floral silk scarf around his head, and carried a black cap embroidered with the Canadian truism “Hockey Is Life” in his hand.

As he traversed the restaurant’s parking lot, Bieber hoisted up his pavement skimmers by the zipper fly, carrying the fistful of excess fabric like a belt. Like any habitual baggy-denim-wearer worth their weft, Bieber has this hand-belt maneuver (as well as other sorts of movement-allowing modifications, such as stopping every few steps to adjust a dragging pant hem) down pat.

Bieber—and another pair of supremely baggy jeans—in January 2020.

SMXRF/Star Max

Thematically, there’s lots at play here, all of which elevate this dressed-down-dinner outfit into an especially high-wire Bieber ensemble. The proportions of this outfit? Enormous. The theatricality necessary to maintain such proportions? Dramatic. The latent implications of Bieber’s taste for sagging denim and headscarves? Complicated. And even in the last gasp of 2023, kudos to the universe for giving us another pair of jeans to think about.