I tried on a pair of wide leg trousers in a changing room of a shop I will not name and liked what I saw. I was wearing these trousers that I will never forget because they had a holy shit moment when I looked down at myself and said out loud, to no one, “oh, these are doing something.” I looked thinner. Like maybe four pounds had been pulled straight out of my body and my body had magically grown another inch taller. I had not done one sit up to accomplish either feat. I bought them. I told my sister Bev they were “structurally flattering” as if I worked in architectural review.
And for the next two years I told everyone who would listen that wide leg trousers make you look slimmer, full stop, period, case closed.
until I wore another pair to my cousin Priya’s engagement do and spent the entire night trying to explain to people, when asked why I looked so different, that actually this was me. By my own admission I looked like someone had taken a marquee to a party by mistake, wandered off, and then found a plate of canapés to put itself in charge of.
Do wide leg trousers make you look slimmer? Ask me again when I’ve finished having opinions about them.
The trousers aren’t doing what I thought they were doing.
The mistake I made, and believed for two years, is what I think you might think. I thought it was the width itself that was magic. Like the fabric was responsible for some great trouser-specific optical illusion where more cloth equals less body. It’s not. That’s never been true. Here’s what is: when it works, wide leg trousers are less about how much material you see and more about proportion, where the fabric falls, and most importantly where your eye lands when it looks at you.
Say you have a pair of wide leg trousers that fit nicely at the hip and waist but then falls, rather than pools, in a straight line down to the bottom of your legs. When those trousers sit just right you are creating one solid visual: a long vertical line running, more or less uninterrupted, from roughly your rib cage all the way down to your ankles. Your eye follows that line quick, isn’t tempted to dive around in your hip area or thighs, and when it gets to the end it registers the shape of you wearing those trousers as being longer and leaner than it started. That, right there, is the whole trick. Wide leg trousers don’t magically make you slimmer. They direct your eye up and down, instead of side to side.
Which brings me to why my cousin’s engagement party went so belly up. The trousers I wore were wide. Yes. Fact. Check that box. But they hit low on my waist rather than high and while they fell mostly straight down they were cut more skinny jean slim through my hips, which created a little bunching effect and a bit of material pooling at the front. It broke the vertical line. When I stood in front of a mirror that night it was immediately clear that my eye kept getting caught at the widest part of my hips rather than being drawn down and past them. My trousers weren’t doing what I thought they were doing. They were just…wide. And being wide.
My mate Callum and I were standing by the buffet table when he looked me over and said, “you look like you’re wearing the tablecloth as a tribute to how wide trousers can be.” Truthfully I didn’t have a retort because he wasn’t wrong.
If you’re wondering how on earth to visualise the specific scenarios I’ve been describing think of me standing by that buffet table asking myself the same question. Here’s the actual truth hiding behind the idea that “do wide leg trousers make you look slimmer:” yes they can. And no they haven’t. Whether they do or they don’t is almost entirely dependent on nothing to do with how wide the legs are and everything to do with waist, rise, and how the fabric actually falls when you wear them. I spent two years thinking the wrong detail was great. It’s like crediting your car for getting you places because it’s red. It’s not the colour making the engine go.
The high waist is doing more work than anyone admits.
Lets rewind back to when I was newly obsessed with wide leg trousers and gave my colleague Nadia some extremely unsolicited advice. I told her, with my now obviously incorrect confidence, that any wide leg trouser would have the same effect regardless of waist or rise and she should just buy them based on how they fit her hips. Not once has Callum offered an opinion on someone’s trouser choice but Nadia did and boy was it good.
Knowing me Nadia ignored my advice, bought the lowest rise pair of wide legs she could find based on look alone, wore them once, hated them on herself, and took a lovely, rude photo of herself wearing them which she sent to me with the caption “I look like I’m smuggling a Space Hopper under here and also somehow shorter than usual.” Bless Nadia. Kids own mum.
Nadia was right. I was wrong. So, to everyone still reading, all this means is: the rise on your trousers matters. It matters more than I initially thought it did and whilst you can still wear wide legs with a low rise, as I did when I believed jeans were magic, it won’t have the intended effect if that’s what you’re going for. It’s why Nadia looked six inches shorter and was secretly carrying around a children’s inflatable. I’ll explain why in a minute but here’s what you need to know about the rise and why it’s actually doing more heavy lifting than the legs of your trousers ever will:
If your wide leg trouser hits high on the waist it’s marking where your natural waist is first off (which is almost always the narrowest part of your torso) and starting that vertical line from your waist rather than your hips. Both lead to the long lean line effect of course but by starting higher you’re actually giving that line somewhere logical to start from. Start too low and you’ve accidentally shortened your torso and added width to the area where that vertical line is supposed to begin, before it even begins. You haven’t changed the width of your trousers. You’ve just changed where the illusion needs to start working from and suddenly it doesn’t work at all.
This, by the way, is also why I think so many people try on a pair of wide leg trousers once and hate how they look only to decide the entire trend is a scam designed to shamelessly sell mediocre trousers to people they don’t actually work on. It isn’t scammy. It just doesn’t seem to work because you picked up a pair without realising the rise is doing about 60% of the work and the actual width is only doing the other 40%. Get a pair that’s too low and thinks its width can save it, and you’ll end up looking like Nadia and her space hopper. Not like the magic cupboard miracle I felt like.
And yes. Fabric weight matters too here. Honestly, it did take me way longer to notice that than it should’ve, which is why I’m not touching it up until later. A lighter, floatier wide leg trouser will billow around as you move, which is great until you get a light breeze that your trousers cling to like they’re trying to honeDegree in being skin tight, or sit funny when you’re seated. Something with more structure to it, even just a decent wool blend or heavy cotton twill, will hold its shape better all on its own so that straight line your wide leg trouser creates stays pretty damn straight regardless of what you’re doing. I learnt that one the hard way on a windy October bus stop while wearing a very light pair that did their own best impression of that hug you get from your grandma when she’s undecided about a handshake. If I remember rightly there was also a dog getting aggressively interested in the material flashing around my ankles. Will report back if I ever see that dog again.
The rest of your outfit is either helping you or actively sabotaging you.
What I’ve not told you so far is that the trousers aren’t working alone. There’s always something on top of them and whether that something is making your life or breaking it is another item of knowledge nobody bothered telling me until I left the house wearing wide legs too many times.
The trouble with investing as heavily in one piece of your outfit as I did with those trousers is that you forget there’s still a top half to consider, and every now and then that top half will undo all your hard work without you even knowing it’s happening.
I realised this the first time I wore my beloved trousers with a boxy t-shirt that stopped at hip height too. Taken together you’re creating two wide rectangles one on top of the other and because they’re roughly the same shape and size your eye doesn’t know where to look first. It just thinks “this person looks wide” rather than giving your legs the once over and working down. I did this at a barbecue once. Same waist-height tee, same legs that were too in love with how roomy they were to actually fit me properly and my pal Dominika stared me up and down and asked if I’d “come as a duvet that’s had a particularly good day.”
Bruised but willing to learn I went with a fitted tee next time. Boom. Suddenly my wide legs looked amazing. Shorter top, tucked in jumper, fitted shirt with the front tucked and back flowing free if you’re getting really fancy. Doesn’t matter what you do on top, as long as you give your eye somewhere clear to start before it works its way down into your trouser’s long vertical line. No defined top? Your wide legs have got nowhere near enough visual weight to carry the whole outfit on their own. It’s not just about the trousers, okay? They need a partner.
You know how I said above that shoe choice matters too? Yep. Still stands. Throw on a pair of heels – it doesn’t even have to be a knee crimper, I definitely don’t – and you’re keeping that vertical line going all the way down to the floor with nothing stopping it. Flat trousers, trickier. Unless you cuff them up they’ll always fall at your ankle and break that line no matter what you do, unless you’ve got legs for days and can actually pull off the wide-leg-but-still-lengthful look in flats. They still work. They just take a pair of legs most people aren’t blessed with to actually make it look like the long lean line I spent this entire essay talking about.
Mine do not have those kind of legs.
I know this now. Ask me how I know.
So trousers hit high on the waist to maximise your natural waistline, they should fall not pool, whatever is on top needs to work with and not against the wide legs, and shoe choice can actually be the difference between someone thinking you look great or how you looked walking around my cousin Priya’s wedding feeling like a tent teaching itself how to flap. Wide leg trousers can make you look slimmer. They just don’t do it how or why I thought they did for the first two years I was wearing them obsessively.
As for that changing room I mentioned way back up? Turns out it wasn’t lying to me. I was just listening to the wrong part.
