San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A feminist reconsideration of wide-leg pants and jumpsuits.
The first time I saw the pants, last summer, was on my friend Jordan.
It was the rare warm San Francisco evening. Jordan showed up to the bar wearing simple leather slides and a billowy white oxford shirt, half-tucked into pants that looked like nothing I’d ever seen: highwaisted and wide-legged and sturdy, fanning out in an A-line before culminating midway between the ankle and the knee.
“Everlane,” Jordan told me, when I asked. She looked breezy. She looked chic. She looked effortless in a way that I was never going to look in my tight-fitting skinny jeans. She looked — at least, she did to me at the time — original.
A gracious friend, Jordan lent the pants to me when we traveled to Portugal together the next month. I didn’t want to give them back. I loved them and couldn’t quite articulate why. Our boyfriends were confused. What exactly was so great about the pants, they asked us? To them, the pants looked kind of … weird. They definitely preferred the skinny jeans.
And suddenly, everywhere I looked, there were the pants. My friend Minda had them in two colors. Caitlin, my former roommate, wore hers at least once a week. Once, I saw three women wearing them at a single party. I spotted them on strangers on Market Street, on Union Street, on Valencia Street. Of course, as soon as I was back from Portgual, I went to Everlane in the Mission to buy a pair. And there, in the store, was a sea of shopgirls wearing the pants, some with a T-shirt, some with a blouse, some with a cropped tank top. They let me take a picture with them in my new pair.
Turns out, the phenomenon of Everlane’s wide-leg crop pant extends far beyond my myopic San
Francisco circle. When the style was first released in February 2017, “it sold out within the week, creating a big demand and hype,” says Kelli Dugan, Everlane’s head of product strategy. The pants had a 12,000person wait list until coming back in
stock five months later. Now, a year on, “we have not seen momentum drop down at all,” Dugan says. “It is our No. 1 casual bottom.” A new version with a slimmer leg will launch Aug. 6.
Audaciously, Everlane calls the wide-leg crop “the most flattering pant you’ll ever try.” Its ad campaign included women wearing sizes zero to 10 — Everlane’s first time including diverse body types. The claim is based on a few features: Its weighty cotton fabric contains just 1 percent stretch, so it doesn’t hug your folds. The pant hits at the smallest point of the waist, then again at the thinnest part of the leg. “A pant that shows your ankle bone makes your legs look longer,” Dugan says.
But that claim has been debunked. Peruse the internet and you’ll discover a deep subculture dedicated to taking down the wideleg crop pant — offered now by brands ranging from Anthropologie and Gap to designers like Jesse Kamm and Rachel Comey. Fashion writers have called the wide-leg crop “fashion trending at its worst.” “They are ostensibly ‘chill’ and yet they are not comfortable,” wrote Molly Fischer. One woman tried them on and felt like “the love child of a teen Juggalo and a pregnant sailor.”
This more or less summarizes the feelings of many of my friends’ significant others (though one friend’s boyfriend, Paul, praises the wide-leg crop’s emphasis of a woman’s backside). And to tell you the truth, I kind of agree. Ankle slimming notwithstanding, the pants don’t feel that flattering on me. They bunch around the crotch. They make the stomach look a little distended. They do not slim the thighs.
But that’s the whole point of the wide-leg crop. I love the way it looks on me, and not because I think it makes my figure look good. I love the pants because they free me, if only momentarily, from wondering whether my thighs look thin or my stomach looks flat. The pants are about rising above that. It’s about looking cool for other reasons. It’s about confusing our boyfriends. It’s about feeling breezy and effortless and comfortable, like Jordan at the bar last summer.