Casting one’s eye over the sea of skinny jeans, jodhpurs, leggings, jeggings and treggings, you could be forgiven for thinking that trousers were being rationed to only one very small, child-sized pair per person. But designers are insistent that we
Casting one’s eye over the sea of skinny jeans, jodhpurs, leggings, jeggings and treggings, you could be forgiven for thinking that trousers were being rationed to only one very small, child-sized pair per person. But designers are insistent that we should be wearing wide-leg slacks this spring, as evinced by the rather strong and significant presence of palazzo pants on the catwalks.
This wasn’t our very first sighting of them: Hannah MacGibbon at Chloé has included wide-legs and kick-flares in her past two feminine and subtly Seventies collections, while Maison Martin Margiela last season created deliberately out-sized strides that stood away from the waist, as if pinned on, and swamped scrawny legs in swathes of fabric. A testament to the stringencies of the formal wardrobe perhaps, a discussion of our modes of consumption even: a nod nevertheless to the fact that wide-leg trousers are one the most classically chic ways of making a fashion statement. It seems crazy to suggest now that women in trousers are in any way social deviants — and yet, there is something provocative about trousers so big as to hide one’s form. Often tailored, always baggy, wide-leg trousers are a direct rendering of traditional menswear into womenswear — they’re subversive still, not the obvious choice nor one for those faint of fashion heart.
Céline’s cobalt blue palazzo pants contravene social niceties by being — forgive me for stating the obvious — cobalt blue (according to the traditional sartorial regimen, bold colour on the bottom is egregious for all but the most adventurously minded). They’re also fitted low on the hip and fasten with an exposed zip, taking very little inspiration from the sorts of wide-leg tailoring made famous by Yves Saint Laurent and Helmut Newton. But they are similar in function: a new mode of dressing for the woman who has tired of her skinny jeans. And there are quite a few of them around. Fashion is shifting as a whole from the Eighties and Nineties inspired day-glo and grunge trends, returning instead to a more caricatured version of femininity inspired by the Seventies, when wide-legs were de rigueur. The lurex and lycra look gives way to something softer, reflected in fluidity of material and movement. At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci showed transparent wide-leg trousers in chiffon, worn underneath skirts worn low on the hips like short aprons. Marc Jacobs meanwhile presented a bubbly and girlish collection in bright hues and candy colours, including a pair of pink satin flares with a snugly fitted high-waistband. They would be saccharine but for the added attitude of their near-shoe-swallowing breadth.
Palazzo pants take their name from the Italian for ‘palace’; they speak of easy uptown luxury and a sort of aristocratic wafting from place to place. As free and mobile as you might feel in them, they don’t have the gravitas of a pair of tailoring trousers because they are usually cut from an altogether more romantic cloth. But that’s not to say they’re only for wishy-washy nostalgics. Far from it – they’ll be usurping leggings in no time. The trouser is dead, long live the trouser!
Zoë Taylor has appeared in Le Gun, Bare Bones, Ambit and Dazed & Confused. She is currently working on her third graphic novella and an exhibition.
