'Like trousers, like mind' ... so said The Clash's sage frontman Joe Strummer (right) Photograph: Getty Images
It's finally happened. Big baggy trousers that show your underkeks (BBTTSYU) are like todally out with America's white hipster kids - who now all wear trousers so tight they might be mistaken for tights, a la Max Wall.
As I write the boutiques and tattoo parlours of America's groovy ghettos throng with lightly bearded skinny men sporting the fierce faces of angry cats, way-too-small girly sweaters and keks so tight one cannot force two fingers inside their waistbands. And I have tried.
In fact tight trousers are now so in they've been made a "do" in that incontrovertible bible of what-hot-and-what's-not, Vice magazine's Dos and Don'ts.
But meanwhile America's black kids have stayed baggy - as evidenced by recent attempts to outlaw BBTTSYU in Dallas. This marks the end of the great black/white American trouser convergence that's lasted ever since Run DMC/Aerosmith's 1986 rap/metal crossover Walk This Way. (Note the tight trousers worn by both sets of musicians).
But it's more than just a black/white split. Black hipsters have joined their white comrades-in-cool in ditching the BBTTSYU in favour of Max Walls - leading to a hip-hop vs hipster split. Meanwhile the white hip-hop kids have stayed resolutely baggy, causing what trouser sociologists are calling the great white hip-hop/hipster trouser chasm.
And there's also a generational split.
In the late 1990's the surviving member of the punk generation finally gave into baggy trousers and face hair (not without some relief as they found the extra trouser room more accommodating of their spreading girths, and shaving dangerous because of the hand shakes they all suffered thanks to several decades of relentless and heavy amphetamine abuse.)
It's 1999: I'm in an Islington kitchen, alone with the husband of a friend of a friend. A dude with whom I have nothing in common except for the fact that we both almost certainly once ran around a disco floor pretending to be a punk-rock aeroplane to The Stranglers' 1977 speed anthem Go Buddy Go. He leans across the table and says, in a guilty half whisper: "I bought my first pair of baggy trousers yesterday."
I knew immediately what he meant. Tight trousers were the defining characteristic of the punk generation. When your dad was wearing groovy bell-bottoms, they had to be.
"Like trousers, like mind," said Joe Strummer of The Clash. And we all thought: "What? Like narrow?" But we all nodded and sneered as if this was the sagest thing anybody had ever said. Plus we pretty much dressed ourselves out of Oxfam shops. Meaning we wore the trousers of the recently deceased. And at that time, as luck would have it, the tightly trousered late-Victorians were popping clog with an eagerness that bordered on the obscene.
Took me a while to figure that out, mind. I attended my first punk gig - the Damned and the Adverts at St George's Hall, Bradford - wearing Wrangler flares crudely safety-pinned into an approximation of cool drainpipes. Boy was I sneered at.
And tight-trousered we stayed, all through the 80s and 90s, even as we screamed in futile rage at the waves of youngsters sporting goatees and long hair and facial piercings, patchouli, corduroy (oh please God no!) and, yes, flares. Even as we surrendered to groovy lady friends who told us repeatedly that the above-the-ankle Two Tone look now signified not that one was a dead cool rude boy, but that one was a tramp, a child molester or a Ribena drinking trainspotter.
They say that if you stand still fashion will eventually come back to meet you. This is true. But halfway through this process, you will look like a total dork. Which is why, around the turn of the millennium, the punk generation ran up the white flag, entered Gap en masse and bought cargo pants.
Now they are left high and dry in trouser limbo, knowing that 40 and 50 somethings in drainpipes would look hideously like the very drug-wrinkled dinosaurs-dressed-as-lamb that inspired their trouser rebellion in the first place. Or Jeremy Clarkson. But also horribly aware their cargo pants now mark their generation as past its shag-by-date as clearly as mint-humbugs, cloth caps and surgical stockings did their grandparents.
The way out? I suggest we reclaim the kilt. It says willfully eccentric, sure. It also marks the wearer out as a complete twunt. But when has that ever stopped us?
