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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Jess Cartner-Morley

Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: how to style leather trousers

A model with dark hair pulled back, wearing black leather trousers with a mustard sweater and patterned scarf.
Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Photograph: David Newby/The Guardian

Leather trousers are not for the fainthearted. They come with … baggage? Mythology, perhaps, is a gentler way of putting it. Either way, you know what I mean. Leather trousers can be suggestive of pelvic-thrusting rock frontmen. Noisy motorbikes. They hint at midlife crisis or teenage rebellion. They are a lot.

But leather trousers – along with gym clothes in public and cancelling plans at the last minute – have been normalised in polite society. There is a new breed of leather trouser-wearer. You know who I mean: she looks as if she could be an architect, perhaps. She is chic and understated (neutral colours, not too much jewellery) and she’s wearing a nice pair of trousers that just happen to be leather, rather than wearing leather trousers in a let’s-get-the-shots-in kind of way. Again, if you know what I mean.

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