I’ve seen it quite a bit, especially in retirement homes.
It’s Evolution.
It may have been a fashion at one time, but it only seems to show up on older stooped men now. When you lose height or weight, you may not be able to keep your pants from dragging the floor. So you pull them up (sometimes with suspenders) and you roll the bottoms. Not every age looks cool in low-cut jeans. Osteoporosis is sometimes the cause of loss of height.
“I grow old, I grow old, shall I wear my trousers rolled? Shall I eat a peach?”
– “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Elliot
There are a number of reasons for the basic fashion.
For gentlemen, a jacket will nearly always be worn. The fashion with trousers is predicated upon the paring, and the visual look of the two. Hip worn trousers do not look good with a jacket. There is a mess of shirt and stomach that ruins the look. A simple business suit needs to be worn buttoned when standing to avoid exposing this mess. Watch David Letterman sometime to see a polished performance of managing the jacket.
Indeed to look really good with a jacket some interesting optical illusions are used - which conspire to make the wearer look tall and slim. High cut trousers make he wearer’s legs look longer - so long as a jacket is worn. In formal dress either a cumberbund or a waistcoat serves a supporting purpose - to confuse the transition point and cover the top of the trousers. A waistcoat serves to cover the braces if the jacket is removed, although for formal wear it never is.
Next, trousers worn with a belt never hang as well as trousers hung from braces. Indeed there is a maxim that a gentleman’s trousers are hung from the shoulders. Moreover, braces are much more comfortable than a belt. Given the trousers are not required to hook onto your anatomy they also afford a tailor many more opportunities to craft a flattering drape.
More modern fashion of course really doesn’t care about such niceties. When the height of yoof fashion is two inches of designer underwear exposed, we are not exactly discussing the finer points of gentlemen’s tailoring. Morning dress is something one associates with royal weddings, not standard professional weekday wear. The ubiquitous business suit is as much designed for convenience as anything else, and belted trousers are part of this.
This thread frankly astonished me. For 75 years I have always worn my belt at the navel. After my first time through the thread I started looking. Yes, I have always seen beer-bellied men wear their belt below the belly. Looks idiotic–at least to me. But then I noticed quite ordinary looking me wear their belt just above the crotch. I asked my wife and she told me that when she buys me jeans (I hardly wear anything else, although usually charcoal) there are three size risers to choose from and she also chooses “traditional”. So it is not so much that old men have changed, but that they haven’t; everyone else has. Incidentally, through fat and thin, mostly the former, I have always had an indentation at the waist.
My SO is shaped roughly like Tweedledee, thanks to several abdominal surgeries which have left his abdominal muscles a ruined wasteland (instead of a waistland!) He also has no butt to speak of. So it’s either pants low under the tum, where the button rubs right on a painful scar over a large hernia, with suspenders d/t the lack of ass to hold them up, or tweedledum 'em up high where he looks like a beachball with legs. He opts for low and painful outside the home, but rolly-polly under our own roof.
I never considered the difficulties of the aging male physique until I saw it up close. When your ass disappears and your tum protrudes, it’s hard to keep your pants up! :eek:
That’s just disturbing
It’s a little of both. Elderly men often get osteoporosis and become hunched over; at the same time they often develop a pot belly and less-muscular upper body. Most of the ones who don’t allow their trousers to droop below the belly will pull them up over the top. The trousers then look high waisted in contrast because when they stoop over, the chest looks shorter.
I came across this old pic, which I thought matched up the subject matter.
That’s a nice look when you have the body for it 