This is the story of my attempt to find some yellow trousers. Before I begin I have to confess that I was finding them so I could replicate an outfit that Kate Moss wears in her campaign for Mango. Pastel coloured trousers are everywhere at the moment and the suggested pairing of that Mango jumper with those Spring Yellow trousers seemed like a good one to me. The person modelling the combination seemed irrelevant, basically what I was looking for was a very specific jumper and some trousers. How hard could that be?
You. Have. No. Idea.
The jumper had sold out online and to be honest I thought that was going to be the tricky bit. When I saw a rail of them in the Mango on Regent street I nearly bought the lot with the intention of making a fortune on ebay. Then I got caught up in the next bit of trying on the adjacently located yellow trousers.
Of course this wasn’t straight forward; trousers never are because there are so many variables in cut and style and fit. These specific yellow trousers from Mango were quite difficult to even get on. It wasn’t the waist size, or the thigh, or the low rise bum or any of the usual gripes a person can have with trousers- it was just the width of the leg. Clothes size has nothing to do with this particular problem, it’s just the standard cut for leg width and it would seem that my legs are too wide. My calf muscles are genetically large; I have legs like my Dad. They allow me to jump like there’s no tomorrow and run up escalators with relative ease. Subject to excessive and abnormal swelling in my ankles, I will never have “canckles” but the downside it would seem is that tight fitting trouser legs are almost always too tight for me.
I once saw a programme about models who only model specific body parts. The leg model said that when it comes to legs, advertisers like them very slim. She had been teased by her sisters when she was younger about her skinny ‘chicken’ legs and now she loved them because they made her lots of money. They probably also allow her to get into any pair of pastel yellow trousers that she wants to…and any that Kate Moss wants to too. Although I make it a rule to never trust advertising, in theory the Mango trousers were a cut and style and fit that worked for Kate Moss. My legs are a different shape to hers so it was probably a bad idea to pick up a style that she was modelling. I bought the jumper and went about my merry way to find more yellow trousers.
Gap were advertising pastel shades but didn’t have yellow. Levi (my usual mecca) were closed. River Island had some pastel yellow slim fit trousers on offer so I tried those and although the leg width was accommodating enough to allow me to get the trousers on, the zip was such bad quality that it didn’t do up properly. An un-done fly is never very cool. Also they were so tight around my shapely legs that they bunched up around the knee. There were ways to fix both those problems- I reckoned I could fix the zip and maybe put some stirrups on the bottom of the legs to keep them pulled taught but the thing about the highstreet is that there are options so there’s no need for me to alter things most of the time. It just takes a lot of trial and error to find something that either has nothing wrong with it or the more usual; I can live with the thing that is wrong with it.
New Look was still open and just next door so I looked in there. The shade their of yellow trouser was less pastel and more neon. From the photo I took it might also look as though they had the same bunching issues as the River Island trousers but in reality it wasn’t as bad. The New Look trousers also felt better; more comfortable, more fitted without being tight. The material was thicker so they kept their own shape and the zip was better quality although the stitching was worse. Oh and you could see the line of the pockets through the material at the front. But then, the material used in the River Island trousers was so thin and tight you could see the line and shade of my underwear through the material at the back. Visible pockets at the front seemed like a good compromise and this was the thing wrong with them that I could live with. I had walked the length of Regents Street and half way along oxford street by this point; I was bored. I bought the New Look trousers and went home.
That’ll teach me for ignoring my business acumen to sell sold out jumpers online and instead, pursue the apparently complicated task of copying Kate Moss.
