Star Struck Style

I’m a Capricorn with Libra rising. For that reason, I know how to iron clothes. You won’t catch someone like me walking around in pants that look as if they’ve sat in the bottom of a dryer for a week. I’m not a Taurus, after all.

But not everyone is cut from the same cloth as me. In fact, I don’t know if most kids today even know how to iron a pair of pants. So, when I see these loose, pleated trousers on practically every menswear runway lately, I wonder how they’re actually going to sell to a generation of kids who have been wearing nothing but track pants for the last few years.

Of course, you could be wearing Hermès pants, like the model in the photo above. In that case, you can afford to have someone iron those pleats into your pants. Most other guys, however, do their own laundry. Old guys like me have been through this before; I wore plenty of pants that looked just like this in the eighties. They certainly required a lot more work than the stretchy, flat front, wash-and-wear chinos that guys have been wearing for the past decade.

A lot of the commentary on “Vogue Runway” right now centers around speculation over how consumers will respond to the current menswear collections in a post-pandemic world. Still, I don’t know if anyone else has asked themselves if the kids of this current generation will buy clothes that they have to iron. Like a lot of those fashion writers, I’d like to see these new shapes return to the streets, but I have my doubts about the skill levels of kids nowadays. Will they put down their phones long enough to learn how to iron their clothes? Do they really care enough about how they look to bother?

Maybe I’ll start posting how-to iron videos on YouTube. Now that’s the practical Capricorn in me talking!