By Guest Blogger - Randall O’Neal

By Guest Blogger - Randall O'Neal

Men that wear phones on their hip...
Men that wear socks with their sandals...
Men that hike their pants way up because that's where it's comfortable...
What do all these gentlemen have in common, other than the fact that they are probably 65 years of age?


They all wear pleats!


If you do not fit into any of the above categories, it is unacceptable for you to be wearing pleats at this point in your life. You should have moved on to flat front pants at very least 4 years ago. In college, men are oblivious to the trouser market because we really do not start wearing them until we enter the workplace. For me, that was 2001 when I was living in New York and entered the fashion industry as an assistant buyer at Macy's Inc. This is where I began to notice guys were wearing flat front slacks in what was a business casual environment. The thing is that it was not my fellow newbies to the workplace, for it was the guys that had been out of college for a year or two. Only a few years prior had business casual become commonplace in the realm of work attire. In that time, style had made its way into the corporate world as gentlemen all over, not just the world of fashion, tried to bend the rules and add a bit of their personality into their wardrobe. Enter flat front pants!


Not that you care to know, but I actually worked in the men's pants division at that time. There was a quantifiable change in sales of pleats versus flat front...the Tipping Point if you will. My supervisor had told me that was the best season ever for flat front pants. Little did he know that the paradigm shift to the flat front body had officially occurred! The trendsetters had spoken loudly for the followers to set in motion the death of the pleat. They were back to being a functional body to give heavier guys a "little more room" at the waist. Skinny guys caught wearing pleats better have good reason or accept the fact that they are a fashion disaster. Apparently they didn't get the memo!


We all have heard that fashion is cyclical, so in 2008, we saw a return of pleats...but only on the runway. It takes quite some time for runway fashion to make it to mainstream closets, and I do not see the quadruple pleat from Comme des Garcons or Dolce & Gabbana becoming the standard any time soon. It's pretty simple why it won't happen. Men have finally realized that clothes aid in the way you look. Pleats are extra fabric on your waistline, therefore making your waist appear bigger than it really is. Flat front pants are slimming and quite honestly make guys look younger, and we can use all the help we can get.


Whether you call them pants, trousers, slacks, britches, gentlemen all over the world should be wearing flat front pants, unless they have some affliction with phones, socks, or high waistlines. I'll save the conversation of cuffs, pinstripes, patterns, and texture for another day, but the basic information you need to know is that flat fronts are the way to go for casual, suit, and tuxedo pants. Don't even think about pleats!