When I was 15, I grew tired of drainpipe jeans, and switched to flares. And I don’t mean Chelsea bags or bellbottoms, I mean FLARES. My friends were still in the narrow phase and I was mercilessly teased because of how wide my trousers were. There was no stretch in them, the denim was heavy, I have thin legs, and I come from a Very Windy City…
Since then I have stuck to skinny, bootcut or straight jeans. Over the past year though, I have yearned for looser fits and denim that I could wear to work. So I have been living in high-waisted flared indigo jeans and corduroys for quite a while. Once I got used to the wider silhouette, I found I could wear more fitted shirts and still look balanced.
I have several pairs – a grey canvas pair, a brown corduroy pair, and two indigo blue pairs. I rotate these with blouses and they have worked really well. Unusually for me, I paid full price for all of them because I liked them so much. Three come from H and M, and one is from Lindex. They are quite similar in style. The back pockets give me more of a butt (I don’t have one) and several have wide hems. They are nowhere as flared as my teenage ones though!
I have these Winston and Elle shirts and alternate them between the trousers.
I used to wear flares back in the day, then I saw Roxy Music (with Brian Eno) in the early 1970’s and copied Eno’s trousers (tight to the knee then flared out so the bottoms were wider than the waist). My waist at the time was 28″ and the jeans I wore had a 40″ bottom to each leg making them terrible in high winds (Edinburgh is like Rome and built on hills so it was next to impossible to wear them without them acting like sails in a high wind).
Ha ha I get the idea about the winds! I once wore a cape and a wraparound dress going round a windy corner. Never again! And a cape…what was I thinking?