Eek! Brace yourself for summer’s trickiest trend
AS A LIFELONG chooser of the sleek and tailored over the romantic and frilly, I have always considered myself immune to the temptations of prints and pretty things.
But something weird happened to me last weekend. While casually browsing in Zara, I was suddenly hit by the compulsion to try on a pair of wide-legged printed trousers. Before I knew it, I was in the changing room with a floral two-piece.
My rational brain looked at it as a possible solution for something to wear, maybe with a blazer, on hot days in the city. In my deeper style consciousness, there was a flickering fantasy going on.
You know the one: where you’re suddenly wafting elegantly around on some Mediterranean terrace on holiday, a movie- star in the Thirties wearing palazzo pants, stepping on to a yacht.
My reflection in the Zara mirror was horrific. The fabric clung unforgivingly. The trousers turned out to have an alarming kind of swirly flare which wouldn’t have disgraced Cher in the Seventies. And the combination of the elasticated waist and back-view was a trauma not lightly forgotten.
Yet despite this initial disaster, the idea stuck. After so many years of skinny jeans and straight-legged tailoring, wide-legged trousers in a more fluid fabric are an undeniably attractive proposition.
THE
persistence of my flowing, printed-trouser obsession is due in no small part to the influence of Gucci.
Designer in charge Alessandro Michele is very much the messiah of floral prints and pussy- cat bows, the lord of maxi skirts and embroidered bomber jackets — in short, everything you’ve seen on the rails of High Street stores this summer.
In fact, speaking of divine influence, this Thursday, Gucci will be taking over the cloisters of Westminster Abbey for its resort show. Now I wouldn’t exactly call mine a Damascene conversion, but it turns out that I, too, am being influenced by the power of the rapidly proliferating new Gucci style.
So back on the High Street I continued my search. Among the most promising candidates were several looks from River Island (the pink rose trousers, now £20, are well cut, as are the black floral printed style, £38, riverisland.com).
If you can afford a little more, the wild floral selby trousers at Whistles (£195, whistles.com) are a chic take on the trend. I do urge you to look for non-wrinkle- prone, non- skimpy fabrics. There are few things less attractive (as I discovered in Zara) than delicately petalled fabric bunched up around the hips.
Similarly, great care should be taken not to buy into the category I have down as festival trousers — often characterised by a dropped crotch, harem shape and the preponderance of elephant in the print.
These are not to be countenanced by a woman of 40-plus.
Then there’s the beyond-thepale shapeless trousers with elasticated waists, which can only possibly be justified as actual pyjama bottoms. Which is not to say that grown-ups can’t do floral prints. I saw Drusilla Beyfus, the eightysomething mother of Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, wearing a cabbage-rose printed Gucci dress at the Vogue 100 party. Very nice she looked, too.
Meanwhile, wide-leg trousers are eminently doable providing the configurations of cut, drape and pattern flatter you.
Some women — the tall, slim and long-legged — will be able to pull on more or less any pair and look amazing. Then again, that’s true of everything. The rest of us are just going to have to doggedly audition a lot more to find the ones that suit us.
If you don’t find any on the High Street, look online. Apparently the world of e-tailers is up in arms about British women’s habit of ordering things, then sending back those that don’t work. Nonsense. Either they want our custom, or they don’t.
If further inspiration is needed make sure you Google the Gucci show at the Abbey.
Of course, there have been more than a few murmurs about the appropriateness of giving over the great church to an Italian fashion brand, but then again, this is an event of nearreligious significance to the plane-loads of fashion faithfuls flying in to worship at the feet of the great Alessandro Michele.
And I say Amen to that.