Drop Everything.(baggy pants)

Byline: editor: Sally Singer

What's with all the baggy pants? Sarah Mower looks at why many designers are going for a little more leg room.

Something mighty peculiar is going on with pants, as no female with an eye for a well-cut trouser can have failed to notice. In unavoidable numbers of collections, crotch levels for summer plummeted to somewhere between mid-thigh and mid-calf, so that on some runways, the models were walking with fabric bagged, bunched, and looped low between their legs. Speaking purely for myself, I was aghast.

It first started rearing up at 3.1 Phillip Lim, where a pair of cropped, drop-crotch silk pants opened the show. It slouched on in wide-leg, baglike, hippie forms at Nicole Farhi and as a slimmer tailored pant (but with an unmistakably low fusion point between the legs) at Gucci. At YSL, the trousered looks rode high on the waist and dipped down below. "I want to give the pant the ease of a summer skirt to suggest a certain femininity," Stefano Pilati said at the time. "The feeling is meant to be both familiar and new."

Last fall, when these clothes were being shown, there seemed no possible rhyme or reason to those low-riding behinds. But then it happened: The bottom fell out of the market. Had fashion's uncanny powers of economic prediction prefigured the coming financial crisis in the sudden drop of the crotch? If it did, the shock didn't scare designers back onto the straight and narrow (oh, and I did so love a straight-and-narrow!). For this fall, Nina Ricci's Olivier Theyskens sent out 26 silky, slouchy, spiral-legged pants. Both Pilati and Marc Jacobs, meanwhile, were of a mind to try pleats, combined in some instances with giant curved volumes on the outside leg.

Though these developments might have seemed sudden and odd, there's a logic behind them that has nothing to do with subprime-mortgage fallout. Part of it, I fully appreciate, is the impatient instinct to overturn the overdone--the domination of dresses, skinny pants, and leggings. We've needed to get out of that somehow. The first sign of change came last winter, when Nicolas Ghesquiere's Balenciaga jodhpurs--an unexpectedly ...