Hockey Player Blesses Us With 'Hockey Butt' PSA

Hot Girl Summer is over, so welcome to Hockey Butt Fall

It’s not often that an ad for pants starts an entire online movement. But it happens, and it’s happening right now. State and Liberty, a clothing retailer that specializes in making nice dress clothes that fit particularly athletic bodies, just released an ad for a new kind of dress pants, and it features an unexpected breakout star that’s fast becoming the internet’s newest obsession: Hockey butt.

This specific hockey butt happens to be attached to 23-year-old Detroit Red Wings player Dylan Larkin, who laments in the commercial that it’s really hard to find nice pants that fit the physique he’s gained from playing such an intense sport professionally.

“My name is Dylan Larkin, and I have hockey butt,” he soberly tells the camera.

He continues, “I know a big problem that a lot of athletes and hockey players have is shopping for pants. We have relatively small waists, and big quads, big thighs, and big butts.”

That’s it. Hockey butt.

Of course, all of Larkin’s explaining is interspersed with extremely slow-motion shots of him doing squats and lunges to demonstrate both that hockey butt is real, and that his State and Liberty pants allow him free range of thirst-inducing motion despite said hockey butt. Lord have mercy.

While the term may not be new, the ad has gone viral and the internet has very much embraced the idea of all kinds of sports butts, but especially the hockey variety.

And because we probably shouldn’t just take Larkin’s word for it, there are also some kind people out here on the internet confirming that this is actually a real thing. Unfortunately, none of them are doing slow-motion squats on camera.

All jokes (and lighthearted objectifying of all hockey players) aside, this ad actually highlights a very real issue with our society: Clothes are all-too-often made to fit one specific body standard, when bodies actually come in every possible shape and size. Whether it’s because you play a sport at a highly competitive level or for any other reason at all or for no reason at all, if your body doesn’t fit that perfect societal mold (as most bodies don’t), it can make shopping for clothes a huge pain in the (hockey) butt.

While State and Liberty is making clothes aimed at a pretty specific population of people, they’re also taking steps toward solving a huge problem, which is that all people deserve to have clothes that fit their bodies, no matter what those bodies look like. And if we can get there while also ogling some really nice butts, all the better.