Look at the outfit above from the last Saint Laurent men’s show. Look, specifically, at the waistline. Do you see how the belt sits a good three fingers from the top of the pants? It’s like a roof deck on a house.
But that belt is crucial. It creates a shape like a fabric pouch that’s been cinched, or a paper bag clamped shut at the throat.
And that, as many of you surely know, is what we call paper-bag pants. During last month’s bout of men’s runway shows in Paris, I kept seeing them. At Saint Laurent they were plentiful. On model after model, the belt was like an equatorial divide — excess fabric arcing outward above, pleats trailing below. I also encountered them at Celine and Lanvin. Willy Chavarria stacked two sets of belt loops on top of each other, creating a dealer’s choice of paper-bag pants.
I found myself jotting each of these instances down because I had never really thought of paper-bag trousers as a men’s thing before. Sure, you could point to zoot suits of the 1930s and 1940s, which often had their belt loops set low. But those were different. They were a facet of that drapey look, not the focal point.
Yves Saint Laurent and Claude Montana played with the shape in their 1980s women’s collections, typifying an epoch in fashion when things were generally cinched and exaggerated. In 2015, my colleague Vanessa Friedman spotted them in a Tod’s collection that was, in her assessment, “a little weirdly proportioned.” A year later, she took note of them at a Stella McCartney show. Again, these were aimed at women. Google “paper bag waist pants” now and you’ll get options from H&M and Michael Kors and Donna Karan. None of the results, as far as I could tell, fell into the men’s department.
That paper-bag trousers migrated onto the men’s runways landed, to me, like yet more evidence that pants are the defining items of men’s fashion over this decade. Pulling back, it was an example of how the conservative, plodding way of designing for men doesn’t fly anymore.
When I last worked retail 15-odd years ago, the sales floor logic was that men were immovable trouser traditionalists. They would find pants that worked for them, pants that more often than not were a generic, dictionary definition example of “men’s pants”: straight cut, zipper-flied, with belt loops that ended at the top, where, you know, belt loops belong. And nothing could be done to nudge these men away from that look.
Those men, assuredly, still exist. But now, so too does a guy who wants pants with volume and vibration. I see the paper-bag waist as a natural outgrowth of the wide pants wave. Once you’ve assembled a closet of pants that are only balloon big, you have to go somewhere else. And where do you go? To something that offers an extra proportional exclamation, something with even more pleating and even more puckering. Something that draws the eye to some place new. Something that is borrowed.
Other things worth knowing about:
-
I have a new favorite term: sune-hara, or “leg-hair harassment.” From this incredible article on how the shorts-at-work debate has roared into Japanese offices.
-
Kim Bhasin has a profile of Bjorn Gulden, the Adidas chief executive, who is hoping that the company can ride a successful World Cup to bigger sales here in America. (I still think the split-in-half Spain-Argentina jersey is corny.)
-
Vanessa has the full report on the largely blah clothes worn in that bizarre World Cup halftime show, but I want to underline that Justin Bieber was again wearing clothes from his Skylrk label, just as he did at this year’s Grammys. It’s early — Bieber introduced Skylrk only a year ago — but the collection seems to have legs. No musician is likely to replicate what Kanye West achieved, for a time, with Yeezy (and I should note that Skylrk’s schlumpy hoodies and cutoff sweat shorts sure owe a debt to Yeezy), but Bieber is clearly giving it his best attempt.
-
Over the weekend, an acquaintance pointed out that Zinedine Zidane, the French soccer legend who was just named that national team’s head coach, has a lifelong Adidas partnership. (Zidane was seen at the World Cup in a very conspicuous baseball hat from its Y-3 sublabel.) The issue? Nike sponsors the French national team. So will Zizou have to wear Nike in his official capacity? Apparently, yes. According to a Nike rep, “the players, manager and technical staff wear federation-supplied apparel in official national team capacities.” Footwear, per the rep, is a different matter. Zidane can still wear Adidas shoes. But how does Adidas feel about him potentially wearing its corporate rival as coach? A rep did not reply on Monday.
The post The Next Big Thing in Men’s Pants? It’s Stolen From the Ladies. appeared first on New York Times.
