Blogs

I have an unerring eye for fashion, if I do say so myself. Which I just did.

If you want to know what's "happening" in men's fashion, look at me.

Then wear something else.

I'm like the canaries that coal miners take down into mine shafts to detect poisonous gases. The little birds have such sensitive lungs that when they keel over, the humans know they'll be in trouble soon.

So when you see me wearing, for example, pleated pants, you need to run, not walk, to the nearest clothing store to buy a pair of plain fronts.

Whither I goest, fashion doth not follow. To put it as Webster's Dictionary might, fashion is what I'm not wearing. If you see me wearing epaulets - don't.

I mention this because of an article I stumbled across in The Wall Street Journal to the effect that fashionable men have started to wear their pants high off their ankles, a la Pee-wee Herman. The style has come to be known as "floods." In order to secure my rightful place in the history of fashion, allow me to describe my role in this tectonic shift in haberdashery's foundations.

For many years I resisted the so-called "European" hemline for pants, which uses excess fabric to form a slight drape over the shoe. I took grief for this from family members, both biological and marital. I didn't care. With all the fabric I saved manufacturers, you could have clothed an Eskimo village.

From my point of view, the extra-long pant leg revealed not fashion, but insecurity. The style seemed to be most pronounced among used-car salesmen, maitre'd's of overpriced restaurants and real estate developers looking to make a fortune using other people's money.

The "high-water" look, by contrast, was a mark of the old-line Yankees of New England who wore their pants that way on the off chance that they'd see a snowy egret on their way into work, and would be prepared to get off the train and traipse into a marsh to get a better view of it. These men didn't care about fashion because they didn't need to impress anybody.

The turning point for me came when I was in an inner-city McDonald's buying hamburgers for students at a school where I volunteered, and overheard a stage-whispered conversation by three girls that, I came to understand, was intended for my ears.

"Is it raining outside?" one asked.

"Is there a flood coming?" another said.

"Maybe a levee broke somewhere," the third said.

I looked at them, noticed them giggling, then looked down at my pants. They were a little high.

It is one thing to endure criticism from your wife or your older sister - you know they've got it in for you. But when unknown teenage girls start to laugh at you, it is time for a serious reappraisal of the fashion choices you have made.

I decided, after a long, dark night of soul-searching, that perhaps I'd been wrong. Maybe longer pant legs weren't so bad. Who was I to buck a fashion trend that had been adopted by millions of men at the behest of sophisticated European designers? "Get down off your high horse," I said to myself, and "Who died and left you boss?" Also "Get with the program."

I slowly began to replace my high-water pants with the longer-legged style, and eventually joined the community of right-thinking men who realize that it's just plain wrong to show your ankles in public.

Unless, of course, you want to be fashionable.

- Con Chapman

Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer whose works include The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Yankees-Red Sox pennant race, 10 published plays and two novels, Making Partner and CannaCorn (Joshua Tree Publishing). His articles and humor have appeared in magazines and newspapers including The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe and The Christian Science Monitor.