Pants with Personality

I love striped cigarette pants. Nay, I lust after striped cigarette pants with a passion as strong as Marianne Faithful's for Mick Jagger, or Eric Clapton's for Patty Boyd, or Pamela DesBarres' for any member of Led Zepplin. However, not including actual rock stars, there are only about three non-model people in the world who can wear stove-pipe straight striped pants, and I'm not one of them. Alas, my build is more like a speed-skater's than a rock star's. Narrow striped pants make my legs look like contour maps, so even though I succumbed to temptation and bought a pair I only wear them when I'm home alone watching a midnight showing of "Velvet Goldmine."

(Since I only wear my striped pants in the privacy of my home I also don't have to deal with the question of whether they're age appropriate. As you might have guessed from my rock-and-roll references, the answer is "most probably not.")

Striped pants appear periodically on the runway (the picture at left is from Balenciaga's Spring 2006 collection). I would positively faint with pleasure if I saw someone wearing that ensemble -- all of it -- but not too much Balenciaga makes it to the streets of my low-rent tourist town. So I find myself hoping that the look filters down to mass-market stores so that the three people who could wear them will wear them and I'd get to see some Pants with Personality instead of the same old sea of jeans. But in order for, say, Target, to stock striped cigarette pants, more than the three people who should wear them will have to want them. If that happens, all those muffin tops caused by low-rise jeans will be replaced by walking contour maps, or, heaven forbid, muffin tops above contour maps, and we don't need that.

By the way, my affection for striped pants only extends to cigarette pants, i.e., narrow straight-legged pants, not to striped flares. Striped flare pants are an abomination and the wearers thereof should be tossed into the Pit of Bad Clothing to stare at each other forever!