Look at the outfit above from the last Saint Laurent men’s show. Look, specifically, at the waistline. Do you see how the belt sits a good three fingers from the top of the pants? It’s like a roof deck on a house.
But that belt is crucial. It creates a shape like a fabric pouch that’s been cinched, or a paper bag clamped shut at the throat.
And that, as many of you surely know, is what we call paper-bag pants. During last month’s bout of men’s runway shows in Paris, I kept seeing them. At Saint Laurent they were plentiful. On model after model, the belt was like an equatorial divide — excess fabric arcing outward above, pleats trailing below. I also encountered them at Celine and Lanvin. Willy Chavarria stacked two sets of belt loops on top of each other, creating a dealer’s choice of paper-bag pants.
I found myself jotting each of these instances down because I had never really thought of paper-bag trousers as a men’s thing before. Sure, you could point to zoot suits of the 1930s and 1940s, which often had their belt loops set low. But those were different. They were a facet of that drapey look, not the focal point.
Yves Saint Laurent and Claude Montana played with the shape in their 1980s women’s collections, typifying an epoch in fashion when things were generally cinched and exaggerated. In 2015, my colleague Vanessa Friedman spotted them in a Tod’s collection that was, in her assessment, “a little weirdly proportioned.” A year later, she took note of them at a Stella McCartney show. Again, these were aimed at women. Google “paper bag waist pants” now and you’ll get options from H&M and Michael Kors and Donna Karan. None of the results, as far as I could tell, fell into the men’s department.
That paper-bag trousers migrated onto the men’s runways landed, to me, like yet more evidence that pants are the defining items of men’s fashion over this decade. Pulling back, it was an example of how the conservative, plodding way of designing for men doesn’t fly anymore.
When I last worked retail 15-odd years ago, the sales floor logic was that men were immovable trouser traditionalists. They would find pants that worked for them, pants that more often than not were a generic, dictionary definition example of “men’s pants”: straight cut, zipper-flied, with belt loops that ended at the top, where, you know, belt loops belong. And nothing could be done to nudge these men away from that look.
Those men, assuredly, still exist. But now, so too does a guy who wants pants with volume and vibration. I see the paper-bag waist as a natural outgrowth of the wide pants wave. Once you’ve assembled a closet of pants that are only balloon big, you have to go somewhere else. And where do you go? To something that offers an extra proportional exclamation, something with even more pleating and even more puckering. Something that draws the eye to some place new. Something that is borrowed.
