Now Men Flaunt the Ankle

Trousers are getting shorter. Will the next battle of the sexes be fought on hemlines?

Trousers are getting shorter. Will the next battle of the sexes be fought on hemlines?

The unthinkable has happened. My ‘Too Tall For His Pants’ journalism professor has walked into the trend books. Over the years, he was called a lot of things—Mr Socks, pant chor. Any attempt to dub him the ‘It’ guy would have meant a jab to the nose. But that was nine years ago. Had he been persuaded to come to the Men’s Fashion Week last weekend in Delhi, he would have made the front row just for advance marking the hottest trend of the season.

Fashion is witnessing an all-out move towards a sharper, more utilitarian avataar, and away from the slouchy. So the dinner jackets have shrunk, but even more notably, pant hems have starting heading north with the urgency of a man with a full bladder. Designers have decided to raise the pant hems from shoe kissing to ankle grazing. The tramp, albeit a well groomed one with slicked back hair, is back with the persistence of a zit. And even though he wheels around a BMW instead of a stolen shopping cart now, his pants continue to end exactly where Raj Kapoor’s did in Awaara—well above the shoe.

Last weekend at the fashion week with a sinfully long acronym (VHIMW), designer Ravi Bajaj sent out a model wearing a velvet hooded jacket over-eager to end above the belly button, over trousers that would have looked like they were your much younger brother’s had they not fit so well. Over the rest of the Men’s Fashion Week, amongst the dandy cowl necks and velvet capes, Indian fashion designers stuck to the ankle show as their theme de force.

It didn’t send whispering ripples down the hall, but did get an ‘ahem’ or two by way of fashion controversy. You see, you send out men wearing velvet detailing and paisley print trousers and titanium prints, it’s just about okay. But you try telling us that pants should end 3-6 inches above the ankle, and not how we’ve been taught to walk about on this planet, you’re asking for a pie in the sky—and possibly even your face. Well, maybe not. Ravi Bajaj seems to have had a recent change of heart. A few weeks before the show, he was clear: slicing trouser lengths was “one of the pressures of the fashion business”. Something that was done “to come up with a new and different trend every six months”. But under the spotlight in Delhi last week, he had trousers creep up with as much glee as anyone else.

Designer Narendra Kumar too trimmed the trousers of a suit ensemble well above the ankle, and Zubair Kirmani, not satisfied with hacking a blue suit, decided to do the honours to a pink one. Nitin Bal Chauhan did his own street take on the ankle, as did Ashish Soni, Rajesh Pratap and Rahul Khanna-Rohit Gandhi.

These are times of pant recession. Evidence of this had already rung home in the form of an argument. The parents were arguing over a hemline—my father’s pants in particular. He thought she was a control freak, she thought he didn’t have the patience to listen. The moot issue was a matter of length. He wanted his pants to end a little above the shoe. She wanted it to cover half the back of the shoe. It’s not settled yet.

At office, there was another vote in the trend’s favour. Our design chief at Open (designer of cropped layouts, one might specify) had this neat illustration of a man wearing skinny jeans cropped up to his ankles, and though he wears his pants like any self-respecting man does, he did think the look was cool.

So maybe the Men’s Fashion Week had something up its sleeves—or whatyoumaycallems—after all. In fact, it seemed the season’s consensus, with nary an ‘if’ or ‘but’ about it. Even off the runway, models were running around with their hair slicked back and jeans folded up in James Dean style over canvas loafers. Stylist Arjun Bhasin showed up with his pink pants folded up.

Designer Narendra Kumar wants us to get used to it. He expects cropped skinny trousers to only get more pronounced with time. “Clothes are cropped because there is a wave towards more active clothes,” he explains, “and as people get leaner, they are going to wear more clothes trimmed like that—because they want to show it off.”

Now, fashion’s idea of ‘active’ doesn’t mean ‘active’ for the rest of the world. It doesn’t mean you’d add to your swing in hot pants or run faster in skinny jeans. If that could happen, Playboy Bunnies in dental floss attire would be setting more speed records than Bolt. It merely means you’ll look more active than the next guy in regular fit denims.

Active, of course, cues Michael Jackson. But as it turns out, the ankle trend pre-dates the original moonwalker’s tragic death. For a couple of seasons now, designers in the West have being trying to sell it as the next ‘big’ thing for men. Allesandro Dell’ Acqua, Dries Van Notel, Neil Barnett, Gaultier and several others have all tried to do the noble thing to save fabric.

The nobility is a tad misplaced, though. We don’t live in times of war, there are no fabric rations today, and even if there were, I’m sure we’d be able to afford full length pants. So what is it, then? The answer could be a much simpler one. Designer Varun Bahl explains, “Pants cropped above the ankles is a very Italian thing… it looks very chic,” adding, “The Italians wear them with these fabulous shoes without socks.”

In sweaty India, though, socks are important… hang on, could that be it? Socks? How’s this for evidence. Ashish Soni sent out models wearing everything from orange to polka dotted socks, reminiscent of Jerry Lee Lewis and Great Balls of Fire from the late 50s. Ravi Bajaj makes no secret of his thing for socks—they help throwing a dash of colour into an otherwise dull ensemble.

But what’s with the ankle? The Ankle, it seems, has been mythologised, romanced even, because of its place in women’s fashion. It was the sight of an upturned one that gave Victorian gentlemen their jollies. And so the ankle’s coming out into the open was a historic fashion moment. Once out, it didn’t take fashion long to cut the skirt into sizes that would give Mary Quant—the godmother of the mini-skirt—the blushes.

Is it men’s turn now? You can almost see those calf muscles shudder. Will the next battle of the sexes be in hem-land? It’s a scary thought. Maybe it’s time at least one of Nostradamus’s doomsday predictions came true!

About The Author

Kabeer Sharma