When I write my memoir I’m thinking of calling it How To Survive In Fashion Without The Right Legs. The struggle is real, when the clothes you like all seem to have been designed with Karlie Kloss in mind. Karlie Kloss is six foot, of which substantially more than half is leg. She and I are different species.
This is not a problem unique to me. And neither is it just a miniskirt problem. Fashion’s current challenge to us norms is the wide-leg trouser. Nothing tricky about a wide-leg trouser, you might think – they are comfortable, they cover everything up – but that’s not how it works. You can’t conflate “comfortable” with “easy to wear”. Easy to wear is an outfit in which you can spend the day feeling confident about what you are wearing, not constrained or compromised by your clothes. Comfortable is a bathrobe. Completely different.
The particular challenge of this season is that the wide-leg trousered images you see on catwalks, in fashion shoots and in shop windows right now are not tomboyish or bouncy. They are graceful and slightly haughty, more palazzo pant than pyjama bottom. You can tell from the way they are photographed: the models tilt their chins up and pinch their shoulder blades down, all long-necked swanlike grace.
To make wide-leg trousers look elegant (ish) without long legs, start at the bottom. Those extra-long trousers that ripple and pool on the studio floor around your shoes are lovely to look at, but not enormously helpful in the what-to-wear-on-Wednesday department. Your trousers need to end just above the floor, which probably means getting them hemmed. Sorry, got to be done. Then, think about the waist. A look that slightly blurs the waistline – a softly tucked or half-tucked top half, or one that falls over the waistband of the trousers – is forgiving. The long and the short of it? If you are short, long is a tough call.
• Jess wears jumper, £29.99, zara.com. Trousers, £275 by Theory from net-a-porter.com. Heels, £125, karenmillen.com
