One-Legged Pants Are Agents of Chaos, but I Love Mine Anyway
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One-legged pants were one of the stranger themes of this past fashion month. It would be wrong to say that they were everywhere, but there were certainly more of them than usual.
At Eckhaus Latta, a model wore a pair that were black and wavy like the crimped hair of a horse’s tail. At Maryam Nassir Zadeh, there was a woven pink pair attached to a pastel green miniskirt, like an elevated yet wacky take on the pants-and-skirt look preferred by Disney stars of the early 2000s. The Puppets and Puppets runway had a glittery one-legged jumpsuit that reminded me of both Cher in her Bob Mackie era and 1980s ice skating costumes.
The movement wasn’t exclusive to the runway either. Months earlier, I stumbled onto a pair of bottoms that were half flare, half pleated miniskirt by emerging designer Zachariah Fairfax at the Lower East Side’s Café Forgot. While scrolling on SSENSE weeks later, I saw a $520 one-legged denim pair by the brand Pushbutton with the simple description: “asymmetric construction.” Actually, the first one-legged pant I ever saw was on Instagram in 2018, created by Sarah Aphrodite, a relative unknown who has made a handful of custom designs for Chloë Sevigny (whose legs would look astonishing in a pair).
One-legged pants make no sense. They remind me of the sensation of being simultaneously too hot and too cold for bed sheets, so you end up with half your body sticking out of a duvet like you’re the filling of a disheveled Hot Pocket. And yet, seeing so many of them, so suddenly, made me excited about pants for the first time in months. Low-rise pants can be divisive, but one-legged pants feel far more controversial. I’d go as far to say the girls who get it, get it … but I think part of the fun is just not getting it at all.
There’s a serious business-ness to pants that completely dissipates when you cut one leg off and leave the other fully intact. One-legged pants reveal nearly as much skin as a miniskirt; wearing them tells the world, “I’m hot, but I also have a good sense of humor.” Forget about who wears the pants in a relationship—I want to know who would wear the one-legged pants in a relationship. I’m positive they’d actually call the shots and overall just be the better dinner party guest.
The thought of wearing a pair of one-legged pants consumed my every moment. I wondered what it would be like to sit on a plush leather couch and feel the cool material sink into the skin of one leg and not the other. You know the people who see a pair of ripped jeans and say, “Did you get them for half price?” I wondered what kind of joke they would make about my actual half-pants. I wondered if wearing them would actually result in getting invited to more dinner parties.
But when I tried to order a pair, everything that was available online was—against all odds—totally sold out. That was a surprise, given I’ve never actually seen a pair out and about (I mean, have you?), but like I said, maybe the people who wear one-legged pants are just attending way better soirées than I am. Sick of feeling left out, I went into my closet and tried to decide which pair of pants I could ruin.
I opted for a simple pair of secondhand contrast-stitch jeans I bought for $11 at a thrift shop two years ago and had never actually worn. I hacked off one leg with scissors, and after trying them on, my fears waned. Dare I say I even felt sexy, and inclined to pair them with two other unexpectedly sexy pieces in my wardrobe: a top by Khaite with comically large puff sleeves and little Miu Miu cap-toe Mary Janes. For the first time since I bought the pants, I could finally see myself wearing them. Why hadn’t I thought of this before?
When I ask designer Sarah Aphrodite how she decided to cut off a leg from her signature asymmetrical pleated pants, she tells me, “There was actually no inspiration behind it. It was just an in-the-moment feeling. I really wanted to cut off that one leg. I remember it vividly.” As for Zachariah Fairfax, whose Triad pants are now sold at Nordstrom and basically sold out, the decision wasn’t impulsive but entirely accidental. “I was doing a fitting for a pair of bell-bottoms, and my fit model happened to have just one leg on and something just … clicked.”
The pantsless leg of an asymmetrical pair of pants is not that different from a bare leg peeking through the tantalizing high slit of an asymmetrical gown. But if Marilyn Monroe wore a red sequined pair instead of her iconic, leg-exposing, floor-length crimson silk gown in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it would have been a different film entirely. Despite revealing the same amount of skin, she wouldn’t be a showgirl attracting the attention of wealthy suitors, but an outcast boring men might write off as “kooky.”
Maybe society wasn’t entirely ready for the freakish sexiness of the garment then. Aphrodite thinks we’re ready now. “I feel like we are living a time of questioning the systems and structures we are part of; we are very much questioning the status quo,” she says. “To cut off a leg of a pair of pants is kind of doing the same thing. We’re used to regular pants—the most normal, basic item of clothing—but by cutting off one leg, it’s kind of saying, ‘Why? Let’s question that!’”
When I speak with Fairfax, he reminds me how it used to be considered radical for women to wear two-legged pants. “Art—particularly fashion—concurrently reflects, dictates, and defies convention. Only through the shifting of collective consciousness does society decide what is or isn’t conventional. … I encourage the skeptical to take a leap!”
Carly Mark of Puppets and Puppets thinks so, calling the choice to wear an asymmetrical jumpsuit “a powerful dressing decision” that makes the wearer feel “sexy and confident and free.” Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta of Eckhaus Latta originally conceptualized the pair in their spring 2023 show, because they felt optimistic and “wanted that [optimism] to be expressed throughout the collection. This is kind of an attempt to respond to this general sense of apathy that we have been feeling.”
They’re right: I had been feeling apathetic about the stack of pants in my closet for months. But it was impossible not to have feelings about my freakish new babies. On an unseasonably warm New York November night, I wore them to dinner. People stared. I could tell some of them were trying to decide if I was serious. I found myself zoning out, realizing how absolutely impossible these would be to wear once the temperature was below 60. I was acutely aware of the bare skin of my right thigh grazing the cold metal of the barstool, while the other started to sweat slightly under the table. But then, someone came up and told me how much she loved them.
Right now on social media, there’s this viral audio circulating of a dull-witted host on Fox News. He’s talking about how women dress today: “They are deliberately ugly-fying themselves. … They are rejecting the truth of beauty.” People said the same thing when women first decided to wear pants, and I’m sure this guy would have way worse to say if he laid eyes on a pair of asymmetrical jeans. But what is more powerful and radical than having the confidence to wear something extremely odd? That kind of conviction is what sexiness is all about, isn’t it?
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