Like a Sock to the Eye: Makers of the Romper for Men Drop a Bomb on Your Frolicking Fancy

Image courtesy of NickLooy from Pixabay

Being that this is America in 2020, I’m sure we’re all going to feel this one.

Men walking around may soon find themselves with worn down clothes and no way to replace them: The four founders of RompHim have announced they’re closing up shop.

RompHim — to which your closet or that of your father’s, brother’s or son’s can surely attest — is a brand of one-piece rompers designed for cisgender citizens with privileged front holes.

In old-timey parlance, guys.

The quartet said in a statement that “It has been an amazing run, but the time has come to close the doors…”

Here’s more:

“There are few things in the world quite like building something from scratch. In our case, we got to take an idea – an idea that most people told us was ridiculous – and turn it into a business. When we started out, we said we just wanted to use fashion to try to bring some more joy and self-expression into the world. In the end we managed to do just that…and had some fun and learned some stuff along the way.”

As you may know, the fashion game-changer launched via Kickstarter in 2017 and saw a fabulous spike online, as reported by NBC5.

Remember the fam frolickin’ around like this?–

But soon after, popularity plummeted.

🙁

Blame your fathers, your brothers, and your sons.

GQ did what it could for the revolution on May 16th of its birthyear:

Yesterday, the Internet went bonkers for a Kickstarter project hocking rompers for dudes. The RompHim, which is currently dividing Americans in debate, has already surpassed its Kickstarter goal nearly seven times over (at the time this article was published they had made over $68,000 dollars in less than two days). That’s a lot of cash for something that looks a lot like an adult onesie. You may not be that surprised to learn that the four co-founders behind the RompHim have yet to graduate business school, and that this project began as an independent study project.

As per the interview that followed, the cotton ode to virility was a pal to the peeing patriarchy:

So you made it pee friendly?

[Founder Daniel Webster Clark]: The thing that comes up for women is, well, “I hate wearing it in any kind of public setting where I’m going to have to use the restroom because I basically have to take it all the way off and it gets quite awkward.” But what we found was for guys was we could work around that problem with a zipper fly. And that solved the vast majority of public restroom issues.

[Founder Elaine Chen]: Personally I am very pro rompers and every time I put one on I know I am committing to it for the day. But I do so anyway because I love the way it looks, I love the style. But recognizing that that is a hindrance for women. We figured, why not solve it for men.

Just one more thing men can have, that women can’t.

Chen: I’m actually jealous… that now all of the co-founders can wear a Romper much more accessibly than I can.

And the media spotlight came from more than just Gentlemen’s Quarterly.

Back to NBC5:

RompHim grabbed headlines for their unique take on men’s fashion: namely, marketing rompers, typically seen as clothing items for women and very young children, to grown men. While reactions were divided, this catapulted discussion of the concept into mainstream fashion spaces like GQ, Vogue and Esquire.

With advertising highlighting a cheeky, “I’m here to have fun, not fit in” attitude, men’s rompers became a short-lived, off-kilter token of late-2010s men’s summer fashion. The actual number of men wearing them, however, was relatively low, and they were mostly popular in the LGBTQ community.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

But there’s a silver (along with — perhaps — pastels and polka dots) lining: The market’s wide open for your waiting-to-pounce business attack.

Work your magic; the men of America need a way to cavort, prance, and roister.

And please do it soon — we’ve got to cheer up Steve Buscemi: