Fashion trends: Skinny jeans are dead. It's all bout the pants now

Men's clothing above waist is no longer in focus. Attention is on trousers now, writes Guy Trebay

In the summer of 1934, the fabled Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli weighed in on women in trousers. “Of course, we don’t want pants,” the straight-shooting designer said, as reported in Time magazine’s August 2013 issue. “Men are already ugly enough in them without having women wear them.”

Schiaparelli was correct. Trousers are ugly. Anyone who has visited places where a wrapped garment is the preferred covering for the lower half of the male anatomy can tell you that. Kilts, dhotis, lungi, sarongs, tunics and even the toga have obvious advantages over the two-legged garment that forfeits aesthetics to practicality in almost every case.

Still, despite the best efforts of designers like Virgil Abloh and Dolce & Gabbana to dress men in skirts, we are stuck with trousers, a garment that, if you paid close attention, was a focus of interest among the nearly 40,000 attendants at Pitti Uomo, the twice-yearly men’s wear trade fair that came to a close Monday.

Skinny jeans are dead. We all know that. Khakis are back. The dropped-crotch style adopted early by people like Nick Wooster — the stylist, Instagram fixture and godfather of social media influencers — has been normalised to the extent that even designers like Brunello Cucinelli are coaxing moneyed consumers to try to get  comfortable in trousers ample enough below the waist to conceal Depends.

Clearly, the incontinence crowd is not the Pitti Uomo demographic, where offerings for millennials far outstrip anything for the olds. Stylish young men with plenty of  money will find more to suit them from Cucinelli than in previous seasons. One clear reason is that, while the proportions of his jackets and knitwear have altered little, the new forest-hued corduroy Cucinelli trousers are hemmed high, cuffed deep, worn low on the waist — and almost uniformly have a dropped crotch.

“Trousers must change,” Cucinelli said at the fair, where his booth, decorated like the interior of a yacht, commanded a premium location in the main pavilion. “You can’t wear last year’s trousers.”

Instagram has something to do with that, Cucinelli added. Anyone prospecting for style information has only to dip into the visual slipstream. That is not necessarily a good thing, if you were hoping to get more than a season out of a pair of pants.

Not long ago, Cucinelli attended a Facebook dinner in California, and to his surprise, found that the sneakers-and-hoodies stereotypes that attach to tech moguls no longer seemed to hold true.

While, in some years, everything interesting about men’s clothing took place above the waist, currently the lower half of the body is getting the attention.

“You look at a suit now, and you can see in one second it’s an old suit,” said Giovanni Bianchi, the style director of L.B.M. 1911, a family-owned, Mantova, Italy-based manufacturer of finely cut, unlined blazers.

© 2017 The New York Times