Expert explains barrel jeans historyfrom @sakata.ken

Transcript

No with barrel jeans, the leg pushes outwards towards the thigh and then curves back in towards the rank. So the silhouette is more of this bendy shape. This shape is over 100 years good, which begs the question, what shape are trousers supposed to be? If you go back to the late nineteenth century, pants were designed for work, for movement and you'll find that the wide or the crescent shape is actually more popular. For instance, in riding pants, you have lots of volume in the thigh and then it cinches up so that you can tuck your pants into your boots. Similar ideas on early worse in Knickerbocker pants where you have this wide shape and then it tucks in again. And you needed these shapes because they arrived before stretch fabrics. You needed a wide pair of pants so that you can move within it as opposed to the pants moving with you. But everything changed when denim arrived in the twentieth century. This is where a different silhouette takes over. Straight leg jeans were designed for minors, labourers, and the construction was very simple and very efficient. Straight legs up and down. And this was very suitable for mass production. Straighter seams are easier to cut and it saves a lot of fabric. And over tier, because of mass production, that shape became more dominant. We started to believe that that's what work trousers, casual trousers, are supposed to look like. And no, in the past decade or so, designers are starting to push back in the other direction to put more volume back into pants. And designers can do this in a multitude of different ways. Take these barrel jeans from a Goldie. Instead of one seam, they've got two. One from the front and one from the side and it creates a triangular panel that gives you volume from front to back and also gives you a structural panel to follow that line from side to side. So these jeans from Acne Studios also achieved that barrel shape with another trick, another engineering trick. You don't see a side seam at all and that's because the side seam has been twisted around. It's a technique that Levi's pioneered in the early two thousands. So you'll see that this side seam from the back ends up at the back of the leg. And they can curve the panel creating not only a barrel from side to side, but also from front to back. And now these jeans from Citizens of Humanity also use another trick. They've removed a section of fabric on the inside, and then they've sewed it together creating that u shape. That is called a dart. And on the side they've added these pocket bags for cargo look better also this adds a lot more fabric, a lot more weight and structure so that the pants wanna do this instead of collapsing down into the legs. No, when you see barrel jeans appearing in shops nowadays, it's not really a strange new trend. And what is seemingly changed for changes sake, new trends, is actually a great example of the relationship between how things move and how things look and design decisions that take you from one to the other.