Patsy Crawford scribbling away
When and if Covid in its many mutations is finally over and done with will we go back to the days when track pants were considered so far beyond the fashion pale hardly anyone ever wore them in public.
Track pants might not be scaling the great haute couture heights but they have now become so fashionably acceptable that women of all ages, sizes and bum slackness are trooping about the streets in them.
This lift in trackie status has been brought about via a range of measures, the main ones being that working from home means never having to don the power suit again; and, the repurposing of what is essentially a pair of cheap baggy pants into what is now termed leisure-wear. Sometimes sports-wear. Or active-wear. Joggers. Sweatpants. A rose by any other name.
Along with the sleek change of name there has been of course a corresponding upscaling (note use of word ‘upscaling’ – very on trend) in price.
We’re not talking off the rack specials here.
These are duds that will set you back $500 and you buy them from shops staffed by women named Verity.
Whether you like them or not, the stamp of approval has been well and truly slapped on them in the form of fashion monitor, Anna Wintour.
Wintour was recently snapped in a fetching pair of red trackies with white side stripe.
If you didn’t know different you’d swear they were a chain store job but imaging Anna Wintour in anything from a chain store is like imagining Cadel Evans riding the Tour de France on Sid Patterson’s old Malvern Star.
The fashion magazines went into collective shock.
What was the Vogue boss thinking? Had she taken leave of her senses. There were intimations of bravery.
To allow oneself to be photographed in the sort of pants discount-shoppies wear when they’re playing the pokies was valour of the highest order.
But it gave free rein to women who for years had been busting to climb out of the couture house and into track pant land.
Within days of the Wintour shoot, celebrities and film stars were barging through paparazzi packs in running shoes and leisure wear.
The rest of us followed suit and soon bums young and old, fat and skinny, wobbly and string-tight were unleashed.
Now trackies are as ubiquitous as the discarded face masks you see all over the place.
It’s a bit different for men.
While for most of them, track pants are a no-nonsense occasional item of clothing adorned by EPL team logos or Formula One motifs, they have become the ensemble-du-jour for suspected drug traffickers.
Any night of the week alleged king-pins or crime bosses, attached by handcuffs to men in suits, are trundled across our tv screens towards unmarked police cars.
Each and every one is wearing badly-cut trackpants.
It’s an indication of how far down the fashion scale crime has plummeted and a far sartorial cry from the elegantly tailored Godfather.
Vito Corleone wouldn’t be seen dead in them.
