Life's Too Short for Pants

Don’t even try to argue; you can’t

The modern woman endures a lifetime love affair with pants. The tears will come, as well as the joys.

It started off with such a bang. In the feminist golden period, between John Lennon announcing the Beatles were more popular than Christ, and the first copy of Ms. magazine appearing on our doorsteps, something miraculous occurred.

Across the fruited plain, in every school, in every grade and class, a voice appeared on the public address system, and announced: “Next Monday, girls will be allowed to wear pants.”

Very often, there was a postscript: “Dungarees will not be tolerated.”

The next schoolday— I was in sixth grade— every single female appeared on campus in trousers, leggings, and yes, dungarees (that is to say, JEANS).

“Not tolerated” be damned! This was so much bigger than going bra-less.

Can young women today comprehend a time in their mother’s lives when they couldn’t wear pants? How did we ever play kickball in a jumper?

There was only one hitch: It’s difficult to look great in pants, to be tailored or stylish. Trouser-liberators like Kate Hepburn were a rail-like exception to the rule.

Jeans were invented to work in, hard work at manual labor— not sashay down the boulevard. There wasn’t a lot of call in the dungarees biz for making one’s derriere look fabulous.

Early tailors never thought about making jean designs that held you in the right places and let you out in the others.

Of course that’s all changed now. You walk into a typical jeans store, and they have walls of folded denim and khaki, with signs directing you to styles like “curvy,” “low rise,” “classic,” “relaxed,” “boyfriend cut,” and the enigmatic “long and lean”— is that an aspiration or a current appraisal?

Whatever their euphemisms, after a frantic couple of hours in the dressing room, you’re sweating like a mule and anything but “relaxed.”

Jeans shopping is a plague. Every pair looks dreadful. You’ve either got camel toe, or you’re swimming— a sad stick figure, or the broad side of a sagging barn. Perhaps a ten-year-old child would look good in their “slim cut.”

But you! — Perhaps you are crafty. You have a sewing machine at home. You slam the door behind those stupid gauchos and give the rebel yell: ”I’m making my own pants, you sons of bitches!”

And this is where the lycra-denim meets the road. You’re going to find out very soon that the reason ready-to-wear jean sizing is a bottomless pit of frustration is because tailored trousers (and that includes jeans) must be individually tailored— with a first draft, and then a final cut, to fit properly. Your ass is as tricky as thumbprint.

Oh, please don’t tell Gloria Steinem I told you this. You’ll still play kickball, hoe a field, or mine for gold far more effectively in dungarees.

But you will LOOK— that is to say, your personal vanity will be flattered— by a skirt, dress, or tunic that flows over your hips, rather than cradles them.

This rule is so right that I can prove it by pointing out that if you have ever beheld a man in a kilt, and sighed over how handsome he looks, you have seen the evidence that men, too, look better in something that doesn’t stuff their caboose into a sausage casing or a bifurcated tent held up with a belt.

In essence, as Jill Sanders, my sewing guru, told me the first day I begged for a trouser pattern: “Life’s too short for pants.”

If you are a beginning sewer, the first thing you must do when you vow to make your own pair of jeans is to pause, breathe, and finally purchase a simple pattern for a straight-grain, A-line skirt.

It can have elastic or a drawstring at the top— it can have a zipper if you’ve got the time. A separate waistband is okay— or better yet, none at all. Long, short, slit, seamed— try them all. 

Kwik Sew Patterns has a wrap-around skirt, #2954, that virgins could sew on their first thread-and-needle outing. And you know what? That one-afternoon, A-line skirt looks really, really, good on: EVERYONE. Men, women, children.

The secret is this: You cut the size that closely matches your fullest hip-area measurement.

That might be your belly, your pube line, or practically your thighs— but whatever the wide point is, that’s your magic number.

Ignore the listings of waist sizes; it all gets adjusted from the hip. That one hip measure, in a skirt, is your guide, as opposed to a pair of jeans, where you’ll need a ledger to track all your tailoring notes.

Choose a fabric, that when washed, has a little drape to it; nothing stiff. Cotton, rayon, silk, linen—anything besides home dec or taffeta. I have A-line skirts in Hawaiian prints, Day of the Dead designs, dots, rude stripes, and one little number with evil toddlers riding a rollercoaster. You may prefer something with gravitas in navy blue crepe. The A-line shape can accommodate anyone’s style with aplomb.

One you have made your first, second, and third A-line skirts, your ego-to-ass ratio will soar to undreamed-of heights; you’ll be feeling mighty liberated. You’ll laugh as you walk past The Gap; “Don’t cry for me, Levi-Strauss!”

You’ll also have the sewing experience that will lend you the serious patience and grand perspective it takes to make your first pair of beautifully-fitted, great-feeling dungarees.

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P.S. — I will, in time, tell you how to make a great pair of jeans that fit. But first, you must kill your pants ego. And . . . You’ll need to ascend to an intermediate sewing stage. You’ll get there! Meanwhile, go commando!

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