The End of the Pant

Women have stopped wearing pants. Well, at least, pants in the traditional sense of the word – the type you used to see swathing the shapely (and hiding the not-so-shapely) legs of, well, everyone. Oh! Those were the days. How I long for them. How I yearn to turn back the clock, to a happier a time, a time of no-nonsense, straight-down-the-line, plain-vanilla pants! But alas, time waits for no man (or woman). Those days have withered faster than Paris Hilton’s career and all I have now are my slowly fading memories of jejune summers – played out on tennis courts and sail boats, sipping cool glasses of lemonade in polo shirts and Lacoste shorts. Everything seemed much simpler then. For one thing, everyone wore pants.

You see, as a bubble-skirt, ruffle-skirt, mini-skirt, leather-skirt, any-skirt kind of a girl, I never thought I’d lament the end of the pant (or ‘TEOTP’ as it is called by those in the know). Indeed, my three-dimensional hips have specific requirements for pants. I was always left feeling jealous of my faux-hipster friends in their skinny jeans, their thin-as legs enviously cleaved by their tighter-than-thou strips of denim. I tried once, to embrace the ‘supposedly’ forgiving hug of the boot-cut; I gave up when my mirror failed to lie about the size of my thighs. “That’s it,” I said, peering hopelessly into the cool gaze of the looking-glass. “Enough is enough! Pants are not for me.” And so I renounced them, happily donning an ever-changing array of silk concoctions, wisps of Chantilly lace, YSL skirts running from my waist to the floor, D&G strips running from my hips to my hips; I was happy – a lone figure in a world dominated by androgynous models with bad hair, but then something happened, people started joining me.

I don’t exactly remember when the pant-burning trend grabbed hold. Was it sometime around ’05, when the dreaded birth of the legging spelt doom for the world of the fashionable? Or was it later – did the end of the pant coincide with Lindsey Lohan’s release of her own batch of ‘designer’ leg-warmer-thingies? Perhaps, even then is too early. Though I suppose there wasn’t a BOOM! CRASH! BANG! moment. The end of the pant crept up on me – real slowly.

It happened in incremental stages. First, there was the girl at McDonalds wearing a t-shirt and tights and nothing else. Next, were the Miu Miu mini-mini-skirts on Kirsten Dunst. Finally, the thing that really cinched it for me was the harem pant. Ah! The harem pant – the crotchless nightmare, stolen from the back of a whirring Dervish – I could never understand the inspiration. It’s almost as if someone snorted one too many lines and suggested (in a drugged-up daze) the uniforms of the Sufis (a mystical branch of Islam) were cooler than wearing pants, real pants. Now, instead, we’re forced to wear these bags of fabric that balloon at the leg and sag at crotch. These aren’t real trousers! They’re potato sacks with well-placed holes masquerading as pants. We must put a stop to it.

Yet, the end of the pant is much more serious than the ’09 interpretation of MC Hammer. I’m not an alarmist. I can handle one season of harem-madness. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. We’ve gone further than that. The condition is much more serious, perhaps, incurable. Recently, a new trend has arisen, fanning the flames of the burning pyre of pants; so-called fashionistas are pulling a superman and are bearing their knickers to the world. I blame Lady Gaga, but then, I know she only contributed so much. You see, many have been conspiring for a long time to bring down pants. Arguably, women were never meant to wear them. Perhaps, this is God’s revenge.

Either way, even if the rapture is nigh and this is only the pre-cursor, I say we still have the power. Women of the world unite! We can take back the pant and claim it for ourselves, for our legs, for any person who has ever witnessed a chubby fourteen-year-old in neon-pink stockings with fat-rolls. It is our right to wear pants. Don’t let the style pages fool you, knickers are not pants, leggings are not pants, tights are not pants, paint is not pants. Open your eyes, stretch out your legs and wriggle on in. We might be in the midst of a GFC, but TEOTP can be avoided.