I’m a respectable height (6’). Back in the 90s, when most jeans were still worn at the waist, I was a 32 inseam. 32 is a good and common inseam; you can find it everywhere. And besides - I earned that 32 by growing nearly a foot from age 12 to age 14! Puberty was hell, at least give me the satisfaction of a height benchmark!
But then the jeans I like started to slouch be worn lower and lower on the waist, even to the hips (for men.) I clung to the 32 inseam for years, because damn it, I’m tall! You don’t go backwards!
But by the latter half of the 2000s (Aughties?), my female friends noticed, and begin giving me hell.
“You wear your pants too long!”
“All part of the style, baby.” “No, you look like a clown!”
“I’m not wearing my damn cuffs above the ankle! I’m not an old man!” “Look at how the back of your cuff is all worn. THAT’S BECAUSE YOU ARE DRAGGING IT!”
“Listen, I AM A TALL MAN, DAMN YOU.” “Pssshhht. It’s all torso. You have short legs.”
So I finally today, with much trepidation, I tried on a pair of Levi’s with a 30" inseam.
:dubious:
:eek:
I actually do look much better. Much cleaner without the jeans bunching up near my shoes. I’m due for new jeans, so I’m throwing them all out and all new jeans will be 30 inseam.
It happens to women, too. I’m almost 5’9", which, in women’s clothes, qualifies as “Tall”. Yet, any time I bought tall pants (like they’d actually give us an inseam. Bwahahaha!), I ended up either dragging the cuff, hemming it, or folding it.
When I was 25, I finally had to admit to myself that while I am officially tall, I have a very long torso and short stubby legs.
Funny, among the younger set, a worn/tattered dragging cuff is pretty “in” as long as the pants in question aren’t dress pants or athletic wear. I think it started as a natural outgrowth of sagging, but it’s become its own thing.
Yes, I’m short. I KNOW I’m short. There’s no reason for pants makers to rub it in by forcing me to cut off half a foot off the SHORT pants I wear so that I can hem them up another inch or so. I’m five foot even. Assuming that ALL of the height was in the legs, that means that they consider a 5’7" woman to be short.
I can just about get away with wearing capris as regular length pants, except that the rise is too high. So I mostly wear skirts and dresses.
I’m not sure it’s still “in” (speaking as an elderly 30-year-old here.)
The dragging cuff look - man, for me, that was high-school and early college sharpness. Think 1998-2002. I can’t wait for 15-20 years from now when it comes back into style.
For the last five years or so it seems to me that the trend is for “skinny jeans” (naturally, with a higher cuff.) I don’t mind this look, but I can probably never wear it.
I’m just built too thick. Short legs, many past years of soccer. Huge thighs.
Well, it depends on who you are, of course. A teenager in tattered jeans can be trendy, while a quadragenarian in the same attire is presumably a hobo.
It was like that with me buying shoes. For years and years, ever since I was 16 I’ve bought size 9.5 shoes. They fit, it worked, I liked them. Then my work was having an online sale on some custom work boots and I simply HAD to get them. I followed their sizing instructions and … what? 7.5? WTF? So I look up other sizing charts online and … 7.5? What the hell? OK FINE I’ll order the stupid tiny doll shoes but when they don’t fit I’m returning them.
I am an old man, and I NEVER wear cuffs above the ankle. Actually it’s the opposite. When you’re aging, you shrink a little, plus your belly pushes your waist lower. Then you’ve got to start wearing a shorter inseam.
Besides, your female friends are right about you. If you are 6’ tall and wear a 30 inseam, you do indeed have a long torso and short legs.
And you’d better check to see whether you are now 5’11".
I’ll never ever understand the sizing of clothing - it seems so random. Like **phouka **mentioned, why don’t women’s pants give inseam lengths? And why are men’s inseams only even numbers? Are they genetically indisposed NOT to require 31" inseams? Plus there are the vagueries of S-M-L, not to mention that there is no universal standard for what a size is. in the olden days when I was a teen, there was no such thing as size 0, let along 00. And “Plus Size” used to mean 18 and up, not 12 and up, like one catalog I saw.
Life would be so much easier if we all wore muu-muus! Or just went nekkid…
I’ve seen a very few women’s sized jeans that would give inseam lengths on the tag; IIRC, the now-defunct Ruehl did. If I find their “Tall” lengths I can buy jeans or pants off-the-rack at Gap/Old Navy/Banana Republic (all the same corporation, though BR seems to go longer on their Talls), but can’t really find many other chain stores that offer the option.
That’s because of your torso/leg proportion. I’m also five foot even, and depending on the brand I might need to shorten petite pants up to three inches. I once knew someone about 5’2" who probably could have worn average length pants- but her torso was so short she probably had to shorten blouses.
Yep (@ Doreen); I’m 5’4", right at the top end of the “petite” height scale for clothing, but I have a really short torso.* I absolutely cannot wear petite/short length pants because they will become floods. Petite-scaled tops would be absolutely perfect (length, armhole height, etc)… if my boobs didn’t throw off the fit/sizing.
I had a corset custom made a couple of years ago (actual corset with steel boning, etc) and the corset maker told me that she had been concerned she’d have to special order a short busk (basically thin metal plates that are on either side of the front clasps) because of how short waisted I am; even though I got an overbust corset, the busk she had to use
was one normally used for underbust corsets.
And I though I had short legs. I’ve shrunk since hitting my peak height at six foot, and I still wear a 30 inch inseam without dragging the cuffs. Back in the 70’s it was the thing to do though. To be a non-comformist, you had to wear jeans with the cuffs worn out in the back, just like everybody else. We couldn’t stand those conformists who didn’t do this.
I still haven’t figured out what weirdness my pants are up to - I have a short torso and long legs, so my pants are either too short or too long in the rise (sometimes both at the same time). I can’t remember the last time I put a pair of pants in the dryer, because I’m usually about half an inch from my pants being just a little too short. There doesn’t seem to be any fix for this - not petite sizes, not tall sizes, not regular sizes.
Have you tried low- or mid-rise pants? Depending on how you’re shaped, you might even want to look for ones aimed at “curvy” women to give you more room in the tush/hips so they fit better.
Rise length is one of those things that seems to vary vastly between manufacturer and pairs of pants, obnoxiously and without reason or planning. You would think petite-length pants would have shorter rises… but they seem to just have short inseams, the rise is a crapshoot.
I also have a short waist and torso, I almost always buy ‘low-rise’ styles which work better with the shape/length of my hips (those 70s style high-rise jeans which are coming back in hit literally 5" under my boobs), but somehow often the front rise is a bit too short (but far from indecent) and the back of the pants comes up too far… what with the ‘gap’ I always have in the back waistband, that’s far from ideal. I just try on tons of pants and sometimes find some that are well-fitting…
I started a thread about inseam measurements a month or two ago (edit: here’s a link), and learned that one’s height and one’s inseam measurements are basically not correlated at all. I’m 5’4" and wear a 31" inseam (32" with medium heels), an inch longer than the 6’ OP’s. But I also have a very short torso and have to pin or alter all my tank top straps because they’re way too long.
I’m so old that I like my pants to come up to my waist.
I actually did have a pair of lower rise pants, but I didn’t like them because I was always hitching them up. I just can’t seem to find that sweet spot - pants coming up to my waist and then just stopping there.
