Tis the season for end of year quizzes, so here goes with my quickfire version. Just one question, in fact, and it’s multiple choice. Is the best time to start wearing a new fashion trend (a) before anyone else, (b) when Kate Moss/Bella Hadid (delete as age-appropriate) starts wearing it or (c) no rush – six months later works.
The answer is c. Yes, you read that right. The best time to get on board with a new look is not when it is news, but a season or two later. Being late to a trend is not just acceptable, it is positively advisable. There are no prizes for being first to the finishing line in fashion. Instead of charging straight in on the first wave of a trend, it’s much more chic to hold your horses.
This feels as if it goes against everything fashion stands for, doesn’t it? Isn’t being in the know before anyone else sort of the whole point of following fashion? Isn’t the kudos in being the first person in your gang to start wearing wide-legged, pleat-front personality trousers like these ones? Well – no, actually. Do yourself a favour and watch and learn for a while.
Consider fashion a spectator sport for the first few months of any trend, resisting the temptation to dive straight in. From the sidelines you can pick up tips at leisure, without spending hard-earned cash and without putting yourself on the line in a look which may turn out to be a fashion red herring.
The kind of trends that come and go at a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it rate are exactly the kind of trends that are best avoided. Real fashion – by which I mean, fashion that is visible in the real world, rather than on a bunch of paid-per-post influencers whose job is pretending to cross the road outside fashion shows hoping they’ll get their pictures taken – moves more slowly than you think. Move too soon on a trend, and your cool new look will be lost on 90% of your audience.
Take these trousers. I’ve been banging on about how you should ditch the maxi skirt, mothball the skinny jeans and wear statement trousers as the centrepiece of your look for getting on for a year and a half. But if you had followed my advice back then, the effect would have been lost on most people, because unless you were watching fashion pretty closely, you wouldn’t have noticed this as a trend. And I do get that while it is my job to follow this stuff at a granular level, most people have different jobs. It is only now, much later, that the personality trouser has made it on to the general radar.
These trousers read as on-trend now, much more than they did when they were first on-trend. The impact of a fashionable fit is greater, not lesser, if you keep your powder dry and wait a while for the world to catch up.
And, of course, you can – in the nicest possible way – learn from others’ mistakes. When these trousers were first around, they were often worn as part of a trouser suit. Reader, I tried this. With a long jacket, I looked like a clown; with a short jacket, I looked like Charlie Chaplin. A year on, I have figured out that trousers like this look best with a shirt or sweater, not a tailored jacket. These are the kind of mistakes you don’t have to make. Fools rush in, and all that.
How late is too late, though? Even if you think you have missed the boat, you have nothing to lose by jumping on board. There is a gardeners’ proverb that goes: “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today.” Or, as we say in fashion: be fashionably late. Even to fashion.
Hair and makeup: Sophie Higginson using Sam McKnight and Susanne Kauffman. Model: Marie at Milk. Jumper: Hush. Trousers by Raey from Matches. Earrings: Astley Clarke
