Leggings: an 80s revival too far

Should you find yourself thinking 'I know what I'll wear today: leggings and a T-shirt', think again. Those two items do not an outfit make – and the bottom half should never have been rescued from the wardrobe of history, writes ROSEMARY MacCABE

‘ZE LEGGING, it eez not ze trouser.” This is, one could reasonably imagine, what Coco Chanel might say, were she to take a jaunt on the Luas and spy the millions of young women clothed in what can only be described as a “semi” fashion. Because leggings, for the record, are not trousers. Should you find yourself awaking one morning to think “I know what I’ll wear today – leggings and a T-shirt”, think again. Those two items do not an outfit make and this is an important life lesson.

Leggings were big in the 1980s, the decade commonly referred to as the “era fashion forgot”. Not to go too much against the grain, but every now and then it’s okay to disagree with a style ethos or two. The 1980s were, above all, a violent cacophony of colour and Lycra and Jane Fonda – so surely a little appreciation is in order?

But maybe this particular comeback is a step too far. While postmodern theorists saw “revivalism” – the tendency of haute couture designers to exhume long-buried trends in their modern collections – coming, the extent to which the legging revival has saturated the public consciousness could never have been foreseen.

They made their initial battle cry on the the autumn/winter catwalks of 2005, to much head-scratching and nose-turning (in an upwards direction).

Sienna Miller was one of the early celebrities spotted embracing this return, and she was promptly accused of attempting to encourage the reconsideration of a happily forgotten trend, but all it really took for a mistake to become a bandwagon was Kate Moss. Thus all the hard work of time and the annals of history was forgotten.

We find ourselves, therefore, at an impasse: leggings have become as ubiquitous as iPods, velour tracksuits and that other sartorial eyesore, pyjamas as outerwear. There seems to be no escape. Spotted on Dublin’s streets last Tuesday: floral leggings, a white vest and a short denim jacket.

On Saturday night in Athlone: black leather-look leggings and a black embellished T-shirt with studded black ankle boots.

On Sunday afternoon in Galway city: black cotton leggings, a white Sebastien Tellier T-shirt and a camel-coloured mac (needless to say, wide open).

The crux of the matter is, leggings leave nothing to the imagination vis-a-vis the derriere. They are comfortable, relatively cosy, and they function as tights that are better than tights because they are warm and won’t ladder, but they are no more trousers than tights themselves, meaning that they must be worn with dresses, skirts, or very long – and not sheer – tops.

But why, you may ask. I’ll tell you why. Now that we’ve given the Lisbon Treaty the go-ahead, we must strive to prove to those who happily scaremongered their way through the campaign that we are not losing our Irishness and becoming European.

For what is Irishness? Modesty paired with no small degree of embarrassment. And what does it mean to be European? A fondness for neons and too-tight clothing, coupled with a brazenness that rarely sees the light of day on these shores, and is best left to Eurovision winners (post-1996) and the Italian aristocracy.

That’s why.