Tapered Trousers

The tapered trouser carries within it the particular madness of the 1980s. They were called "peg leg pants" then, a term that sounds almost primitive now, but during those years of calculated excess, men's tapered dress pants became totems of a specific kind of power. Consider the silhouette: wide at the hip, ruthlessly narrowed to the ankle, a shape that appeared first in downtown clubs and ended somehow in Wall Street boardrooms.

The men's carrot fit trousers, as Europeans insisted on calling them, marked their wearers as people who understood something about the moment that others did not. Slim tapered pants for men suggested both control and risk, the twin obsessions of the decade. What we did not say about tapered fit trousers then, what we barely understood, was how they reflected our broader cultural tightening, our need to contain and constrain. The peg leg pants trend spoke to mergers and acquisitions, to a certain kind of masculine anxiety dressed as confidence. That men's tapered suit pants have returned tells us something about our own moment of uncertainty masked as nostalgia.