the pants should be wider, people!
fantasizing about pants, silk, and being a chick under a heat lamp
I’ve been trying to write a novel for the November novel writing month and it’s been hard for many reasons, most of them having to do with the fact that writing a novel is simply a difficult thing to do, but one of them being that I’m hung up on describing this one desire of mine, and hopefully of my protagonist’s, perfectly.
I picture this desire every time I begin feeling depressed and periodically during depressive episodes, or depressive days, or depressive moments, and it begins as a soft glow in the distance. The fistful of yellow light comes closer and intensifies until it swallows me whole, or I swallow it; either way, the effect is that the sun eats me and instead of dying, I just feel content and warm and light and like everything is okay and like I don’t have to worry so much. It’s the absence of anxiety. I’m a chick under a heat lamp at the tractor store. I’m inhabited by a mystical being made of star that fixes me forever and it comes to me from the outside. That last part is important.
One day I’ll get it down. Hopefully, that day happens at the beginning of November. In the meantime, I’m waiting for a Cinderella blue silk scarf to come in the mail and join my fabric family.
The scarf desire was born out of a need for more accessories, and yes I said need, because you wouldn’t eat a soup with no spices and I wouldn’t wear an outfit with no accoutrements. I’ve been needing more pretty little spices of accessories since I started investing in clothing pieces in neutral colors that blend together to ideally make chic outfits. I love repeating outfits, but sometimes a certain day’s version of me demands to be an individualist and she wants to wear our normal outfit with a scarf the color of Cinderella’s ballgown and I don’t see why she can’t. One day I’ll wear it around my neck a la Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and the next I’ll wear it around my head with big plastic sunglasses shielding my eyes like her Charade character and either way I think what I really want is to be on an adventure. For now, while I work and write, my scarf will do.
I’ve been thinking a lot about wide-leg pants recently, as I love to retreat into the fantasy of fashion, and my thinking paid off because it turned into searching and my searching paid off because I found a pair of the WIDEST wide-leg pants in a buttery, gold silk on The RealReal, in my size, on crazy sale, from an Oscar de la Renta runway collection of the late aughts. And I wore them for the first time to impersonate Diane Keaton.
Wide fabric legs are having a moment. The teens are enjoying their baggy, sometimes cargo jeans, though those seem to be low-slung and oversized all over, not the wide-leg shape I’m referring to that billows out after hugging your waist and the top of your hips like two upside-down ice cream cones. Two sexy upside-down ice cream cones… And Vogue reported in July that designers were making billowy palazzo pants for fall. So of course I have been influenced.
Diane Keaton loves her wide-leg pants, even if she didn’t love my Halloween costume. (She shared the costumes of seemingly every other Diane Keaton in the world but me on her Instagram story! But I won’t hold a grudge about it.) Still, she wasn’t the reason I started my fateful search for silk wide-leg pants. That inspiration came from seeing a perfect pair of pants made by Cawley Studio, a beautiful made-to-order London brand that I would ask to design my entire wardrobe if I ever write this novel and it gets adapted into an HBO show. :D
The Cawley Studio pair is comically wide, literally, like I think they resemble jester pants quite closely. And I love that about them. I’ve been drawn to a lot of exaggerated silhouettes this year. Most of the pieces that I’ve been buying take up space on and around my body in dramatic ways. (Never forget my Issey Miyake bat wedding guest outfit.) (Okay and the Matrix-meets-garbage bag ensemble.) (I guess I’m an odd wedding guest!) I spent a lot of the spring and summer in a pair of Babaa white linen pants bought half-off during their best sale of the year. And I’ve also found two wonderful, oversized wool coats — both hit at least at mid-calf with structured shoulders, one in dark gray and one in navy, one able to be buttoned up all the way to the top — for very little money in the men’s section at Goodwill recently.
Fun pants solve a common style issue: general outfit formula reliance on and boredom of a top and jeans. When set atop a pair of fun pants, tops have a chance to shine in a new light, to participate in a new dance. Fun skirts do this too, but fun pants can be dressed down in a way that skirts never seem to be able to achieve. But then again, we dress down our outfits far too often in my opinion. Why are we dressing down all the time? Casual-ing ourselves into our graves? Wear something fun and funny and wide! Be Diane Keaton even if she doesn’t approve!
I watched an old comedy recently, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, at the recommendation of New Yorker writer Rachel Syme and her delightful weekly Hotel Movie Club. In it was a trove of summer outfit inspiration (linen suits! braided bun pigtails!) but my mind remembers one thing the most: a pair of wide-legged pants. There are only so many tracks up here.
I suppose what’s really on my mind is the upcoming holiday season. Every year I hope to make the best of it. Every year I envision myself at holiday parties wearing glamour-oozing ensembles laughing while holding a champagne glass and suddenly possessing better posture and diamond earrings. Every year I want to host a party and the pandemic ruins it. But this year I’m busting out those silk, wide pants, worn with my new blue scarf and maybe an oversized, cashmere blazer I found recently at Goodwill (it was really a good haul that time) and singing We Need a Little Christmas.
My sister already put up her tree.