Considering women have only been allowed to wear trousers for the past 100 years, it’s hardly our fault if we haven’t quite got the knack of it yet… but you can’t say we don’t have fun trying.
From jean genius to combats that never saw any action beyond a punch-up outside Wimpy, here are all the cor-blimey trousers of our youth. Have I got trews for you!
(I have)
The embroidered denim flares
Worn with a t-shirt bearing an alliterative animal motif – ‘dopey dog’ or kitschy kitten or melancholy marmoset or some such – these Tammy Girl wonders were part jeans, part primary school status symbol. Flowers were good, but if you managed to snag a pair with flowers AND a glittery butterfly then you were instantly queen of the roller disco and entitled to all the free Panda Pop you could drink.
Or at least, that’s what I heard.
The corduroy loon pants
You might not have called these loon pants in 2002, but your mum did – while laughing so hard she peed a bit, and recounting a story you absolutely didn’t want to hear about her sporting a pair in 1973 behind the bins at a youth disco with a bloke named 'Colin the Chopper'.
Short for ‘balloon pants’, presumably because they signalled INSTANT PARTY, you wore them either with Sketchers and a floral gypsy top or with a Nirvana hoodie and a scowl. They were the last word in bohemian cool (all that fabric! Such swish!), until weather intervened. In the wind they would flap gracefully like a pair of elephant’s ears, and in rain they mopped up all the pavement juices like a piece of crusty bread in gravy. A high-maintenance trouser.
The combats
It’s not sufficient, really, to just say ‘combats’ – it’s like saying ‘cheese’ or ‘Madonna comebacks’, because there are just SO MANY TO CHOOSE FROM.
It was a decade of multi-pocketed evolution, from the khaki combats you wore to learn the talking bit from the beginning of Never Ever, to the bright pink Cyberpunk pair with the mystery strips hanging off the side that you sported during the brief phase where you went around telling people you were considering a sub-dermal piercing. The pockets would be useful, you reasoned, for storing all your antiseptic swabs.
(What were those strips FOR, while we’re here? Apart from giving your mum something to drag you back into the house by? I always hoped they were a kind of ripcord that would cause them to inflate like a neon goth parachute, but in all my years of loitering round Camden market I never saw it happen).
The Adidas poppers
Or the ‘Adidas’ poppers, if, like me, you did the majority of your trend-led purchasing in a shop called Funky Fashionz that also sold mops.
Of course, most respect was reserved for the girls who opened their poppers to the knee, like a sexy side-slit skirt that you could also play netball in. Daring sports luxe has been around for longer than we think, folks.
The pedal pushers
When I was 12, I won £50 as a school prize. Being the hip young cat I was, I chose to spend the whole lot on a lilac pleather biker jacket, a lilac boob tube with a handkerchief hem and a pair of pedal pushers with little beads hanging round the bottom.
It was a look that screamed ‘academic prizewinner’ – much the type of thing a young Mary Wollenstonecraft would have worn, had she been let loose with 50 quid in New Look, Worthing – and the pedal pushers were the best bit. Especially for a girl who had recently learned about nicking her mum’s razor to nick, in turn, the bottom two thirds of her own legs. 'HERE ARE MY CALVES, WORLD!' they cried.
If you weren’t lucky enough to have pedal pushers with their own beaded newsagent’s curtain, they were probably denim, black, or maybe white if you were brave and hadn’t started menstruating yet. The most crucial feature of the pedal pusher was, of course, the little triangular slit at the bottom of each leg, ‘for bending’.
Without it, scientists warned, the bottom half of our legs might simply have snapped off – Reebok Classics and all.
The white linen trousers
So many thongs, SO LITTLE TIME! Would you go nude (coy), white (pointless), white with diamantes (seductive, risk of snagging) or hot pink (‘yes yes, here is my thong’)?
All pube outlines at the top and beaded flip-flops at the bottom, never before has a teen clothing item been so proudly sexy and so oddly middle-aged at the same time. In fact, a popular fan theory by academics* claims Sisqo’s Thong Song was actually inspired by the time he did a salsa class on a SAGA cruise.
*me
The hipster bootcuts
It seems quaint now, at a time when we can wear tapered tartan plus fours out of the house without anyone throwing stones or reporting us to the Lord Chamberlain or anything, to think that plain black slightly-flared trousers were once a pioneering fashion item, but it’s true – when ‘hipster’ had nothing to do with beard oil and everything to do with exposing your kidneys to the elements.
Once you’d mastered the basic model (lime green cropped halterneck, Spice Girl wedge trainers) you could graduate onto a pair that laced up at the fly (corset top from Jane Norman) or a pair made from glittery Teflon (cowl-neck sleeveless polo neck). And of course, the final exam: total shoe concealment.
The harem pants
'Mmm yah, I’m actually really into Eastern mysticism just now. In fact, I’ve eaten at Masala Zone three times this month.'
The trouser-skirt
Looking back now they might seem ridiculous, but at the time the iconic trouser-skirt made a distinctly late-90s kind of statement; one I like to think of as 'Yes but how can I put MORE FABRIC on my body?!'
Some mavericks were already taking matters into their own hands and wearing separate skirts over trousers, so it was only right for the high street to play Frankenstein and sew the damn things together for us. We’d never had it so good! My friend Cassie even had a ‘skirt-skirt’, though looking back now I can’t be entirely sure she didn’t just get tangled up in a valance sheet and decide to style it out.
But why did we let it end there? Why not trouser-shoes? A jacket-dress? Why not an entire outfit, socks and pants and everything, entirely sewed together so that all we had to do in the morning was winch ourselves in and go? Were we worried that come the Millennium, Y2K wouldn’t compute our outré fashion hybrids? For shame.
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Follow Jess on Twitter @LaurenBravo
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.