When Life Was Groovy: Pants!!

Time for some groovy pants from the 70s!!

Starting off with a bit of a Western them with Wrangler jeans.  So if a cowboy is also called a 'poke, the is a cowgirl also called a 'pokette??  Oh never mind.....

Not so Western, more casual from Aldens.

Hmm, I'm not so sure about these pants that Kathy is sporting.  I can't recall ever seeing these in real life!!

Well back to a bit if a Country theme........I guess???  

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. No way you can call that "country looks" and no way you'd wear that in "the big outdoors."

Wendy and Karen in some nice Springtime 70s pants.  Although it looks like they are on some kind of farm, at least they are not claiming that the look is "country." (And what's up with the fish them on Karen's shirt??)

These were "hard to find" and for good reason....

And finally we'll end on an elegant note.  At least what passed for elegance in the JCPenny catalogs from the mid 70s - long, floppy bell bottoms in bright prints.  Somehow I just don't remember seeing anything like this in the discos back then!!!

That's So 70s: Tunic Tops and Stretch Pants

What a combo, only in the 70s......

And courtesy of Sears Junior Bazaar, no less. All I can say is "That's Soooooo70s!)

That's So 70s: High Rise Pants

Certainly one of the biggest complaints against the younger generation today is the low slung baggy pants, and I admit I find these sloppy and disgusting myself.   Maybe it is because back in the 70s we didn't have that problem.  No, no, no.  In fact, the exact OPPOSITE style seemed to have caught on for awhile.  Not sure what in the heck I am talking about?  Perhaps some examples will illuminate you....

We used to refer to these as "high waisters", but whatever.   Naturally they go well with the groovy shirts and scarfs straight from the same time period.  I'm not too sure exactly WHERE a young lady of that time would wear such an ensemble: dinner?, dancing?, golfing?, horseback riding?  Oh I get it now.  You'd wear such an outfit if you wanted to stand side by side in a park staring off to one side!

You can sort of start to see the late 70s bell bottoms look in some of them.  Here, we are in that awkward era right before that so the pant styles just sort of thrashed about (with matching jackets no less).  When it came to 70s pants, the look was long and lean.  Heck here they even have VERTICAL striping to make them look even longer!

Only women could get away with this look.  This style of pants on a guy would immediately label him a nerd (as if the calculator on the belt didn't give that away already).  In college we had an engineering prof who wore these types of pants.  We nicknamed him "Zipper".  Yea I know, we were mean, and he was a really great guy to boot.  Oh well.

As if the ridiculously narrow waist on these things wasn't enough, here they accentuate that with some kind of a wide belt that looks like something off a geisha girl.  What?  Why not throw in tiny shoes that deformed the feet while you're at it?  Perhaps the scarfs were some kind of fashion requirement with these things?  The combination is quite odd, wouldn't you say?

As we know, all fashion trends start off as cutting edge and then evolve inexorably to some ridiculous extreme before going extinct (only to be recycled again in a few years). It's kind of like how the dinosaurs reached their most outrageous sizes right before their demise.   To see this development for these high rise pants, one only has to take a look below....

Wow! That's a whole lot of checkering going on there!  Perhaps ol' Professor Zipper was more in style than we realized!

So there you have it.  Proof positive that the 70s had no room for the low slung trousers of today.  We can only hope that this style comes back.  They may have looked a bit strange, but it certainly beats than alternative we have today!

WAIT, WAIT, don't leave yet!  We have a special BONUS pic!  As I was browsing casually amongst the archives (and getting ideas for next week) I happened across this gem and just couldn't resist myself!

I asked myself "Should I put this in the current post about high waisters, or an upcoming post on plaids, or an upcoming post on Random Weirdness: Headgear?"  It could have gone in any of those, BUT the shear height of the waist on this plaid nightmare forced me to include it here!  The clincher was the elastic band belt, and the fact that the model is striding so confidently towards high fashion style.  Upon seeing THAT I had to say "High Rise Pants: That's Sooooooo70s".