In men's fashion world, it's Hammer time

The Baltimore Sun

PARIS -- Hammer pants, samurai pants, genie pants - the kinds of trousers you thought were gone forever were, believe it or not, the centerpiece of the Paris men's shows.

After the skinny, cropped, ankle-baring looks in Milan, Italy, the big news out of Paris this week is the return of the voluminous, billowy trouser. While not every designer sent models down the runway in knickers roomy enough to hide a bone-in ham, most offered their own take on the more generous trouser silhouette: high-waisted, baggy at the midriff and tight at the ankle.

John Galliano made the case with streetwear-inspired baggies; Yohji Yamamoto showed outsize military cargos; and from Belgian Kris Van Assche, who must have been the hardest-working man in Paris this week, there were Russian peasant styles bloused at the ankles for his namesake collection and zoot-suit-inspired bottoms for his debut at Dior Homme.

Van Assche said the time of Dior's celebrated New Look for women also was the time of the American zoot suit for men (and its French counterpart, a style known as Zazous). His update on the look was the most wearable of the wide, titanic trousers. He actually made them look elegant.

Yamamoto was one of many designers to riff on the military uniform this season, sending many of his models down the runway in roomy trousers that ran the gamut from nearly normal dress pants to drop-crotch cargos with buttoned-on outsize pockets and zippers and laces running knee to ankle and accentuating the calves. He paired them with drooping and draping military-style pea coats, trench coats and jackets in muted grays, khakis and blues. The overall effect was military fatigue, as in the toll it takes on the men in uniform.

Jean Paul Gaultier's collection was a pure camp romp through the military wardrobe, with high-waisted navy whites, World War I flying-ace capes, Russian sailor hats paired with skimpy shorts and a sheer blue top, and knee-length jodhpurs with an insignia-festooned bomber jacket. Flowing silk shirts and sarongs came in an anchor pattern and enough silver and gold braiding to wardrobe a Sgt. Pepper's album cover. The most wearable pieces were dark denim jeans shot through with metallic threads and a blue double-breasted pinstripe suit with subtle gold braiding at the wrists.

Galliano, tongue in cheek, mounted a full-scale assault on the audience in a church strung in parachutes, camouflage netting and whirling airplane propellers. His models were warlords, mercenaries, Black Panthers and terrorist bombers, sporting ammunition clips and attitude.

In addition to World War I military jodhpurs updated for 2008, the designer, who called his collection "Mad Max meets Venice Beach," drew on the baggy silhouette once popular among the streetwear crowd, offering it here in a knee-to-navel rise and enough olive drab, black, black-and-white patterned and gray fabric to construct a parachute.

Adam Tschorn writes for the Los Angeles Times.

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