After a long and glorious run, Armie Hammer has announced that he is “officially” retiring tracksuits. Pour one out for le trackies.
During his appearance on Conan, Hammer explained why he's over them and what led to the wild affair he had with Adidas, and specifically, their striped "le trackie," as cleverly renamed by Elizabeth Chambers, my personal icon. He tells Conan O'Brien it all happened one morning when he woke up on Day #39287 of the Call Me By Your Name press tour (as entertaining as it was, it went on for 14 months!) and decided that he was done wearing normal clothes. He felt like a senior going through "senioritis" and all he wanted to do was wear pajamas to class. So he did. And the rest is history.
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In the weeks following, Hammer documented his tracksuit journey on Instagram. He can be seen globetrotting the world in borderline thotty poses wearing various brightly-colored sweatsuits He wore them in London, he wore them in New York City, and he even wore them to a black tie event in Beverly Hills. To put it simply: he over-indulged. "I got oversaturated and burned out on tracksuits," he says.
But I think there was a little more to the tracksuits than meets the eye. Right now, Hammer is gearing up to promote two vastly different films (Sorry To Bother You, On The Basis Of Sex) and he is even set to star in a Broadway play, Straight White Men. He's got to leave the trackies in the past-ies because he is moving on with his life. Plus, at the time, the tracksuits were Hammer's way of subtly saying "F you" against the industry that robbed him of an Oscar nomination (this first video of him wearing the tracksuit is literally one of the greatest rebellions I have ever witnessed), and his way of letting the world know that he is, in fact, not Oliver. If you're gonna do a hard reset after an intense life event, then might as well make it comfortable.
Hammer also told O'Brien that he currently has a closet full of 70 tracksuits, boasting a wide array of brands, not just Adidas. He has FILA, Armani, Boss, and Tom Ford even offered to make him a custom one. With all those tracksuits and no one to wear them, Hammer has started giving them away (there's probably one being messengered to O'Brien's house as I write this) which is probably the only silver-living here because that means as Unofficial Armand Hammer Correspondent I should be send one, for journalism.
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So here goes my formal request for a trackie: One unworn Armani tracksuit, please. It's okay that it's too big.