At my part time job, we sell basic, casual clothing and for the longest time, for six of the seven years I’ve worked there and for years before that, we’ve always sold leggings.

Good old tapered leg leggings.  Some years they’ve had ribbed ones, in a variety of colours, but in recent years they’ve only had the plain 95% cotton/5% lycra leggings.  In black.  That’s right:  I cannot find the perfect pair of well-fitting jeans but an afficionado of the 1980s could pop into our store and get herself a pair of tight-fitting leggings to wear with her two-sizes-too-big sweatshirt.  And while she’s in the mall she can have her mullet refreshed too!  Where is the justice in this world (and where has this bitterness come from?)?

Eventually, my store got boot cut leggings–still tight through the thigh but they did not cling all the way down to the calf; rather they flared out a bit from the knee.  From a distance they would be mistaken for skin tight black pants, rather than a tapered monstrosity–and got rid of our tapered leggings.   For the past almost two years, however, we haven’t had any leggings at all.

Yes, now that leggings are the latest big thing, it’s a bit frustrating to have to tell the slender females who are trying to be trend followers, and the ladies who come in to buy their new winter leggings that this year, when everyone and her dog is selling and wearing leggings, when some of these ladies would actually be called “cool” for the first time in several decades, we do not have a single pair. 

Our timing is impeccable, no? 

I have no doubt that next year our stores will be deluged with leggings in every material, colour and texture.  We’ll be giving them away (no purchase required!).  And we’ll be happy because we’ll think that we’re being trendsetters.  Unprofitable trendsetters.

I personally don’t mind that we’re out of the fashion loop because anyone over a size six looks like a sausage in leggings or tight tapered jeans.  And even though my size three coworkers and customers, with their long limbs, pull off the look beautifully, I have never come across anyone who I’d say the syle was “made for”.  They just happen to be part of that subset of the population that would look just as good wearing a soiled diaper on their head and a moldy dishrag as a poncho.

Filed under: Beauty, Job by jummy