leg room; Are thigh-huggers about to become a thing of the past.

Byline: Sarah Mower

It's strange how fashion desires seize you out of the blue sometimes. There you are, taking one of your dress reflexes for granted, day in, day out, and then-whoomph-a passion for just the opposite thing hits you like an evangelical conversion. It's what fashion people call "adjusting the eye," a sudden perception that something fundamental has shifted. And from that point on, there's no going back. Put on your trusty habitual garment the next morning and, hello, it's wrong.

Just such a thing has happened in the pants arena this season. I time the event to precisely 10:46 a.m. on March 6 in Paris, when the second model walked down Chloe's fall runway. She was wearing a pair of Phoebe Philo's glen-plaid mannish trousers with deep cuffs and a narrow leather belt. With the trousers went high-heel brown leather sandals and an Empire-waist camisole, layered over a long-sleeve Henley T-shirt. Putting it together like that-the feminine top and shoe with the man-cut bottom-was a stroke of styling brilliance that made a radical idea look not just wearable but also relaxed and pretty.

So now a new trouser is on the loose, the standard-bearer in a breakaway movement from the tight, thigh-hugging, low-slung things that have dominated our wardrobes for the last decade. It's about time, if you ask Philo. "Suction-packed hipsters?" she sighed when I met her at her studio. "It feels like that was a real nineties silhouette. When I think of tight pants, I think of the nineties." How awfully damning if you don't want to hang around feeling dated. But, since the powers of boredom work on what we want to wear, doesn't it also mean it's high time for an alternative?

Will baggy trousers be it?

We'll need reassurance before committing ourselves, of course, conditioned as we are to expect pants design to be aimed at outlining our rearview. Recent fashion history has been dominated by the influence of Tom Ford's Gucci bootlegs, Alexander McQueen's Bumsters, and Helmut Lang's narrow boy-cut pants. Then, on the side, we've lived through the explosion in denim first triggered, way back, by the low, tight Earl. Given all that, it's hardly surprising that the thought of an unstructured bottom can make a girl nervous. Not to worry, says Philo. "I think it's incredibly sexy, an oversize man's trouser on a woman. It reverts back to that old wearing your boyfriend's clothes. I buy men's trousers quite often-Miu Miu's menswear and Helmut Lang's menswear."

Intensive refinements have been going on in ...