Lisa Armstrong | August 05, 2009
I FINALLY got my head around leggings -- and then leggings around my thighs in a way that seemed relatively successful -- this year, a full 30 months after their first appearance outside a gym since the early 1990s.
That's it, I thought. I can do this. Therefore, according to the Law of Sod, in another three or four months they'll begoners.
By rights they should be dead already. It's two years since Nicolas Ghesquiere put gold metal leggings on the Balenciaga catwalk and Beyonce snapped them up for pound stg. 12,000 (about $24,000); she's still rocking the 80s look on her I Am... tour, courtesy of Thierry Mugler's show-stealing costumes. It's a year since Lady Gaga hit the ground in her Catwoman high-shine leggings. That's a lifetime in youth trend years. Yet leggings, having momentarily slowed down towards the end of last summer, are back stronger than ever. In Britain, River Island has sold 750,000 pairs of leggings over the past 12 months. Marks & Spencer sells more than one pair of leggings every minute.
According to Averyl Oates, the buying director at Harvey Nichols, where cashmere or Ottoman leggings ring in at about pound stg. 400 a pair, they will still be hot come late (northern) winter, early spring. How did this dead cat bounce come about? Why has the most influential force in the business -- the public -- taken to leggings the way it previously took to skinny jeans, a trend that lingered in the spotlight far beyond its allotted 15minutes and can accurately be said to have transcended from passing fad to wardrobe necessity? On a subliminal level, leggings mark the end of a decade's obsessions with big breasts. The erogenous focus is switching to legs. On a practical level, leggings may ultimately have even more longevity than drainpipes, simply because they're more comfortable and more forgiving now that we've learned to wear them under dresses, tunics, oversized boyfriend jackets, baggy T-shirts, mini-kilts, cocktail dresses and other ingenious thigh-concealers. This is not the early 90s, when the only way to wear leggings was with a teeny tunic or patterned shirt. Although teenagers are choosing to wear their leggings increasingly with skimpy tops (presumably to differentiate themselves from their more cautious mothers), wearing leggings now comes with numerous safety clauses.
Even the age issue seems to have been packed off to the style mortuary. Leggings are just the job to help legs that may be slightly past their best or have what Jane Shepherdson of Whistles delicately calls "the corned beef effect" of mottled skin. Oates agrees: "We've noticed women wearing them across the age divide. To be honest, there's no such thing as age at Harvey Nichols. It's more about mental attitude. Actually, leggings or treggings (trousers-cum-leggings) are great for older women as they give them the opportunity to wear something form-fitting without revealing too much skin."
The more ingenious brands now offer support leggings and styles, courtesy of Damart, that promise to burn off calories while you wear them (that would probably be true of most clothing, strictly speaking). But the main sell is that being black (unless you're really up for a challenge), any pair is optically slimming and as Belle Robinson, co-owner of the Jigsaw chain, notes, "a brilliant way of putting a twist on a classic outfit, whether it's a little tweed jacket or a sprigged tea-dress". Robinson had just finished shooting Jigsaw's autumn catalogue when we spoke, and hadn't planned to use leggings.
"But the model showed up with her own pair and whatever we put on her just looked more youthful and a bit edgier worn withleggings".
For those with ostentatiously good legs, there are leggings that offer advanced degrees in treacherous style challenges (laser-cut leather leggings from Rodarte spring to mind: worn in the wrong way, they look like congealed vermicelli). In other words, leggings offer the complete course in fashionology, from the Janet and John early reader of plain matte black to the PhD of stretch chiffon and sequins leggings from the cult brand Les Chiffoniers. Like the denim trend of the early noughties, leggings have spawned a cluster of premium brands, including Lindsay Lohan's own range and Kova & T, the label started by Roman Abramovich's girlfriend Dasha Zhukova and her friend Christina Tang, which spawned a craze for wet-look leggings. It took all of six weeks for approximations of Les Chiffoniers and Kova & T to filter on to the high street. At about pound stg. 8, for the cheapest pair at H&M, up to pound stg. 35 at Topshop, leggings are proving to be the high street's God-sent (or Balenciaga-sent) recession buster, albeit one that has eaten into sales of trousers.
"Leggings are hard to beat," says Yasmin Yusuf, the creative director at Miss Selfridge. "We're finding that our customers wear them during the day to tone down little tunic dresses and whip them off at night when they want to ramp it up. Given that you can wear them with cropped T-shirts or shirt dresses, they're one of the most versatile pieces in a wardrobe."
Miss Selfridge has more than a dozen categories -- leather, wet look, patterned, lace, cut-out, metallic, denim, geometric, slashed, latex, liquid -- and three lengths, knee, mid-calf and ankle.
"I knew when I was in LA last September that they were going to get a second wind," Yusuf says. "They had made the journey from American Apparel to all the really upscale boutiques such as Kitson, where you could buy leather ones for $US1300 ($1585). Until then, leggings had been merchandised as accessories, but now retailers are arranging their looks around them, specifically shoes and jackets. In 2006 girls wore leggings with flat pumps. Now women are using them to draw attention to an amazing pair of heels."
None of this has passed unnoticed by designers, who filled their autumn-winter 2009 collections with what might best be described as extreme leggings, from Alexander Wang's black bandages, worn with tourniquet stretch minidresses, Meadham Kirchhoff's heavily embroidered leggings or Gucci's oil-slick shine leggings to Stella McCartney's silk ones that seemed to be attached to stalactite-heeled boots.
Even so, the continuing appeal this summer has taken retailers by surprise. "We're selling many more shorter dresses than we anticipated," says Shepherdson, "because women feel confident when they can wear them with leggings: the shorter length looks much more modern and sharper now, but it's difficult to wear in summer without the comfort blanket of thick black tights."
There is one sector of the population, however, for whom leggings will forever be a barbed issue: men. That alone will seal their success for a while yet.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Why we all love legging it
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