Some fashion designers use cotton. Others wool. Chad Nazam uses stuffed animals.

Nazam, 22, a bubbly Virginian who speaks as if he had just chugged three Celsius energy drinks, has built a small but swelling profile in the online fashion community by taking perfectly good jeans and sewing at least 200 stuffed animals along the pant legs.

“In fashion, a lot of things are boring,” said Nazam, who runs the brand Le Rêve Nazam. His Beanie Baby-ish jeans are not. “I’m able to kind of do what I want and be a little wrecking ball in the industry.” A plush, candy-colored wrecking ball.

The $650 jeans fall somewhere between Burning Man and Build-A-Bear. Imagine contorting a Mike Kelley sculpture into streetwear. Picture wool chaps, but instead of wool, you have squishy pigs, monkeys and bears.

Nazam said he has professionalized the production of his poofy pants and made a robust business out of selling them.

The cutesy animals are hand sewn onto the front of each pant leg by a team of sewers, including his 79-year-old grandmother. A single pair takes as many as eight hours to make and weighs, in his estimation, 6 or 7 pounds.

Only the front are Muppetized, so you can still sit in them. In a pinch, they double as goalie pads. “You could jump on your knees and you wouldn’t feel anything,” Nazam said.

Nazam slots in with a clique of young designers who take an unvarnished and extremely online approach to making clothes. No fashion degrees, no tech-pack know-how, just thread, an Instagram account and some why-not chutzpah.

“A lot of people dress the same,” Nazam said. He wants people to look at his clothes and think, “Wait, could I wear that?”

A diverse constellation of stars have worn Le Rêve Nazam plush pants.

In late October, DK Metcalf, a wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, wore the plush pants on a game day, triggering a wave of interest from American customers.

“Everybody loves a good conversational piece, right?” said Dani Hill, a stylist in Dallas who started working with Metcalf last season.

Hill said Metcalf already had the jeans in his closet and had never worn them. She chose them for him to wear because, she said, when an athlete is coming through the tunnel and the cameras are out, “you’re looking for something that sparks the eye.”

The sculptural pants were indeed heavy, but if anyone could muscle into 7-pound trousers, it’s a football player. “He’s a tough man,” she said.

True to their celebrity co-signs, it takes a unique character to want these pants.

“Someone who’s going to buy these is not just going to Walmart,” Nazam said. They’re for concerts or sitting courtside at an NBA game. Still, the kidcore kitschiness of the pants doesn’t appear to have limited his customer base: Nazam said he has sold hundreds of pairs in the past year or so and that demand could soon outpace his production capacity.

Validating Nazam’s assumption about where the stuffed animals surface, Jason Bitton, 35, an entrepreneur in Toronto, recently bought the jeans (after seeing a photo of Metcalf wearing them) and wore them courtside at a Toronto Raptors game. “I’m always looking for something that’s unique, pushes the envelope,” Bitton said.