In the interests of market research and narrowing down exactly what the attraction is, here's
some observations about changing fashions/young people without the beer.
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| Aptly titled Swedish loons |
I've always been a fan of the high waist in trouserwear, from Oxford Bags to Bowie Bags (as advertised along with split knee loons, often in the same ad, in music papers, and worn by their eponym during his Hunky Dory period), and, although not as personal wear, A-line Bags with a 3-button waistband and 3 inch turn ups, usually worn with a 3 star sweater showing some lower chest, all the way to the logical apotheosis of the full-blown Patrick Moore look.
I've regarded with grave misgivings the apparently ineluctable tide of the ever-lower waistline, at times allied with the ever-lower crotch, in that case revealing more and more of the wearer's choice of brand in underpant (fashion industry singular).
That particular style seems to be on the wane, although at its height we saw young men voluntarily rendered unidexterous when upright by the need to keep a grip on their pants to stop them falling around their ankles.
The aftermath of that trend is still with us, and has combined with the Norman Wisdom/Pee Wee Herman-style size-too-small fashion in menswear (see: http://robocono.blogspot.no/2014/09/defibrillated-frankensteins-monsters-of.html) to produce an obligatory builder's arse effect in any level of deviation in posture from the fully upright, and displacing the back pockets to the top of the thigh so that the wearer ends up sitting on anything in the pockets.
The effect is of altering the anatomical proportions to give the appearance of having an extremely long body with severely truncated legs.
This effect is further enhanced by the wearing of shoulder bags with an absurdly long carrying strap, placing the bag at mid-thigh level; as wilfully awkward and counter-intuitive as the similarly generationally-divisive practice of swinging the arms from side to side across the front of the body when walking (see: http://robocono.blogspot.no/2014/10/the-light-is-seen.html)
Simon Cowell and Jeremy Clarkson have done their best to stem the tide of the ever-falling waistband by personal example, but I'm pleased to announce a more credible champion of opposition to this craze to simulate a cartoon character body/lower limb ratio.
I have seen the future, and its name is Leon Bridges.
“At the beginning, people didn’t understand it,” he says of his style, “especially in Fort Worth, Texas. They see a young black man wearing high-waist pants, up to his nipples, and shirt tucked in, and they’re just [his voice ascends to an astonished falsetto] ‘WHA’???????’ But eventually they started to respect it.” - Interview by Michael Hann in The Guardian
