Womens Pleated Pants | 70's With A Vengeance

Do you remember the wonder of the 70's? Windswept curls, magnificent mustaches and high waisted pants that unashamedly sported bold pleats from top to toe. Only two out of the three trends mentioned above applied to women as well as men, care to guess which ones they were?

Many of us reading this article may not remember the 70's at all, or perhaps at best, remember it in a blur of childhood ignorance. Those who were teens in the 70's are now in their forties, with many of them heading full blast into their fifties, and as we all know, fashion has a notoriously short memory and a definite blindness when it comes to those who dare age. What's the upshot of all of this? The 70's are being rediscovered and put back in style faster than any of us can watch Magnum P.I seduce a troubled heiress.

Now of course, for those of us approaching our 30's. (I'm so grown up!) Memories of pleated pants bring with them a definite rankling that creates an involuntary sneer about the nose region. Children of to 80's remember pleated pants as being something dorky school administrators wore, and saggy bottomed moms. The idea of seeing them in a fresh new fashionable way is quite a paradigm shift.

For better or worse however, pleated, high waisted pants are in right now. They're really in. Coupled with cropped military style jackets, they're prancing up and down the Fall runways as if they never left.

Before you reject this fashion trend out of hand, there are some advantages to it that you may be unaware of. For starters, low waists have been in vogue for some time, which was fine when you were in your teens and early twenties, and probably still is fine if you happen to be in your teens and early twenties now. But if you're following the arrow of time as you should and succumbing to inevitable body changes that come with age, your low waisted pants may now simply be relics of an age gone by, relics that leave you with bits of your derriere hanging out at inopportune moments.

The beauty of high waisted pants is that you never, ever accidentally display your butt to the world, and moreover, you don't get those dreaded muffin tops that can appear over the sides of lower cut pants.

So even though our first instincts might be to reject these high waisted pants with their 'Principal' pleats, it may actually be in our best fashion interests to purchase them and wear them as if nobody had heard of a cell phone before. (And by that, I of course refer to the fact that there were no cellphones in the 70's. It was a more innocent time, where bullies had to bully you to your face, and if you ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you didn't waste half an hour trying to get reception before finally trudging your way to a gas station.)