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 be goners.
By rights they should be dead already. It’s two years since Nicholas
Ghesquière put gold metal leggings on the Balenciaga catwalk and Beyoncé
snapped them up for £12,000 (she’s still rocking the 1980s 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.
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 around £400 a pair, they will still
be hot come late 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 15 minutes 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 learnt 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 1990s, 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.
Not only that, but the fashion world has finally developed something that,
unlike wafty chiffon dresses, skimpy halter-necks, city hot-pants and baby
dolls, could have been conceived specifically with the British climate in
mind (like everyone who lives here, I’ve nursed decades worth of climate
grievances).
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. Averyl 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, the 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 with leggings”.
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 matt
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. American Apparel, the US
chain that specialises in dance-inspired jersey pieces couldn’t have hit the
UK at a better time. At around £8, for the cheapest pair, up to £35,
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,” says Yusuf. “They had
made the journey from American Apparel to all the really upscale boutiques
such as Kitson, where you could buy leather ones for $1,300. 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 Jane
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.
