Why I hate skinny pants…

(This post really needs some pictures of me in my flare-pant-wearing days. I will try to dig some up when I get home).

Why so many skinny pants??!!

I hate skinny pants. I do not get it as a flattering look. I do not understand for a second why all pants are moving in this direction. Let me give you some context on my skinny pant story.

When I went to work in Tokyo, Japan at 22 as an English teacher with GEOS, my first real job out of Uni, I bought my first real suit. Of course, I’d had suits before. A school blazer and trousers. Shirts and ties. Put to one side the incredible embarrasment when I submitted myself for an Army SSLC (Short Service Limited Commission) and turned up at the weekend-long training/selection event without a suit jacket. I only had my leather jacket. Picture me and 20 other young guys all suited and booted, and me in my trenchcoat leather jacket.

OK stop picturing that now. It’s too embarassing.

Back to the point. I was going to Japan, and bought a cool suit from River Island. Back then, this is 2002, you could get suit trousers in the boot-cut style. Wide leg, approaching a flare. Not a lot of shops had them, but it was a thing. They had it on labels. There was no skinny fit as I recall.

Oh, what heady days.

Now it is as if boot cut suit pants never even existed. Google them, try and find specialist shops, and they do not exist. NONE! Why was it so necessary to completely erase the existence of boot cut suit pants? Let alone flared suit pants?

I used to have the most awesome pair of enormously flared jeans. I loved them! Bought from Afflecks in Manchester, each pant leg was like its own skirt. If I bicycled my legs I thought I could fly. Baggy pants were a thing back then. Maybe the tail end of a thing, but still a thing. Now they are nowhere. The best suit pants I can get are ‘regular fit’, which obviously taper pretty snugly to the calf, pulled there by the prevalence of skinny fit.

It is like politics. The extreme position pulls everyone over. I am sick of it!!

You will be stunned to hear that I am still wearing, these days, the suit trousers from that very first suit to Japan! That is 16 years ago. I have been through probably a dozen suits since then, jackets and trousers, all worn to destruction. Somehow the original were the best. They fit great. They flap like angels’ wings. I am in a rapture when I wear them. It is surely the boot-cutness of them that has allowed them to endure so well.

Let’s go back to that, shall we? MAKE BOOTCUT GREAT AGAIN!!