Wide Boy: What The Return Of Flared Trousers Means For Men

long leg, an almost 70s flare.” This was a sentence I wrote in my notebook back in January during the men’s AW19 fashion shows. These were the words of Clare Waight Keller, the designer at Givenchy who dressed Meghan Markle for her big day. The flare is part of a new era for menswear at the Parisian house, marking a distinct shift from the previous administration, where the brand had come to be defined by streetwear, and a sellout rottweiler-emblazoned sweatshirt. Flared trouser suits in strong red and a fabulous teal blue appeared on models walking through Givenchy’s couture salon in Paris. It all rippled with a breeze of expensive glamour. Waight Keller cited not just the 70s but the 90s as inspiration, another era with a strong flared trouser game, if you think of Britpop stars such as the mighty Jarvis Cocker. Fast-forward a season, to the close of the SS20 men’s shows in June. I posted on Instagram an image from the Celine show by Hedi Slimane, captioned: “A flared Celine jean. That’s all, Paris.” Slimane’s model army strode the runway en masse for a finale rammed to the hilt with flared trouser hems, underlining the fact that the flares trend looks likely to have legs, as it were. I left this show with a head full of images of Yves Saint Laurent during the 70s, on a rooftop in Morocco. I was also more than a little obsessed with the idea of getting my legs into a pair of Hedi’s new jeans. Read more at The Guardian.