Friday, March 20, 2015

Highwaters



I was scanning through the Sunday flyers the other day when I came across the Sears ad.  "Gee," I thought, "Those pants look rather ... unfortunate.  Why are they so short?"


First off, these pants in the Sears ad are really ill-fitting - check out the bunching in the crotchal area and the way the pockets jut out in the above photo.  AND they are too damn short.  Back in MY day (heh), we called them highwaters.  Highwaters are really popular with the elderly, who fear tripping over their pant hems and falling.  My Mom, as she got older, would cuff her pants halfway up her calves so as to avoid an inadvertent fall.


But!  Evidently highwaters are a thing now, because Sears is calling them "ankle pants", and it's not elderly people who are modeling them but considerably younger models.  Who presumably will not understand if somebody MY age yells out "Hey, when's the FLOOD coming?" as they pass by.

Ankle pants.  What WILL they think of next?  Bell bottoms?  Oh, wait, bell bottoms already came back - a couple of times.  Overalls?  I actually saw some overalls in a store this past weekend.  It's like we are doomed to repeat the fashion faux pas of the past, over and over again.

Too bad I already threw out all of my seventies-era polyester running shorts.




4 comments:

~~Silk said...

We short folks love those "ankle pants". Some don't need hemming to come to the top of the shoe, and when they do still need hemming, at least we don't end up cutting off all the taper.

I think tall people like them because they can be worn with any height shoe heel, and if you are proud of shapely ankles, you get to show them off.

I think the real reason though is, as usual, they're different, and therefore absolutely a must-have for fashion slaves.

I've been hoping to see loose-fitted A-line dresses again.

rockygrace said...

~~Silk, you are right! As a short-legged person myself, I could probably buy these and have them fit perfectly, length-wise, with no hemming. I'm in that awkward-land, size-wise - misses' pants are often too long, but petite pants are too short.

I don't know why I get so worked up about the stuff in the store flyers, though - ninety percent of my clothes come from thrift stores. And then go back again, eventually - I just bagged up a big old bag of stuff tonight to donate. Time to accept the fact that turtlenecks are never going to work on me.

fmcgmccllc said...

I adore ankle pants, they are the perfect lenght for shorty inseam me. I do not care them on taller people. Yea, and I can't wear turtlenecks either, cannot stand anything around my neck and they make me look dowdy with the boobage.

rockygrace said...

fmcetc., "dowdy with the boobage" is cracking me up this morning.