Subscription Notification
We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. Please update your billing details here
Please update your billing information
The subscription details associated with this account need to be updated. Please update your billing details here to continue enjoying your subscription.
Your subscription will end shortly
Please update your billing details here to continue enjoying your access to the most informative and considered journalism in the UK.
FASHION

Can you wear the runways’ latest no-pants trend?

Harriet Walker on the history of going out in one’s undies and its latest incarnation

Camila Mendes in New York in February
Camila Mendes in New York in February
GETTY IMAGES
The Times

Keys, phone . . . trousers? In the most fashionable circles, one of these is now classed as a non-essential item — and it isn’t because the style set are trying to cut down on their screen time.

Before I introduce you to the concept of what the internet is calling “pantsless dressing”, let’s take a moment to feel grateful for smalls mercies: that we are speaking American English here, not the King’s, and that what we Brits mean by “pants” remain very much on.

Nevertheless, there is a tribe of It girls wandering around without their trousers. Bella Hadid, the Jenners Kylie and Kendall, and Emily Ratajkowski have all popped up in their pants (the underwear variety) recently — admittedly, for the last this is practically a state of très rather than déshabillé given she is more often seen wearing no clothes whatsoever.

Bella Hadid in New York in September 2022
Bella Hadid in New York in September 2022
GETTY IMAGES

Hailey Bieber was spotted in a pair of Saint Laurent leather shorts so small they looked more like a belt; Diesel’s new £795 viral belt-skirt literally is one. After the most recent Miu Miu and Chanel shows, industry chat was not of hemlines but of gussets, while at Bottega Veneta the addition of tights seemed positively democratic.

Every generation discovers the art of pantslessness — from Wonder Woman to Beyoncé, some women have taken great strides while not wearing any. Then they learn to put them back on again: going out in your knickers in one’s twenties might be classed as a tastemaking statement, but it becomes, in one’s seventies, the reason you can no longer live alone. It isn’t fair, no.

Advertisement

Yet it is not for me to feign outrage — I too went out in my pants during my thigh-gap heyday (2002-2008). Mine were a giant pair of black Dolce knickers that I wore with a T-shirt tucked in to — checks notes — a really quite grotty east London pub. Did I regret it? No, it was a shame how unreconstructed the rather vocal older male boozers seemed to be. Almost as if they weren’t aware this was a significant catwalk trend.

Kendall Jenner in Los Angeles in November 2022
Kendall Jenner in Los Angeles in November 2022
ALIX NEWMAN/SHUTTERSTOCK/REX FEATURES

For me, the bigger issue is what the pants these days — and therefore the pantslessness — actually look like. Mine were sleek and high-waisted, borderline gymnastic and with something of the Edie Sedgwick or Bette Paige to them. Yet Hadid and the Jenners have plumped for a variety of low-slung and baggy white cotton briefs that bring to mind the Sloggis other mere mortals may reserve either for Rab C Nesbitt cosplay or wearing after a caesarean. It is a sort of youthful privilege, I suppose, to appear so defiantly pre-partum that you can appropriate the world’s least flattering undercrackers and persuade others it is a good idea. (Then again, perhaps it’s for the best that these attractive young women are in Homer Simpson pants rather than the come-hither variety — productivity rates are already at a global low.)

Still, if you think that what this crowd are doing has no bearing on the state of your own bottom half, you are sadly mistaken. For these are the very same It girls who have persuaded us variously into high-waisted jeans and low-waisted jeans, or cargo pants, gold chains and leather blazers recently, even though many suspected that the last three in combination could make anyone less young, less thin and less rich look like an East German bouncer. It brings me no joy to have been proved right on that — but turn the other cheek and take off your trousers. What could possibly go wrong?