One-Legged Pants: the Lame Trend that Seduces Designers

One leg in, one leg out: from where does this unusual asymmetrical piece come, appearing on the catwalks of the last Fashion Weeks?

Shorts or pants? Facilitating the task to the eternal undecided, some designers have found the bold way to combine the two. The beast: the shape of an asymmetrical pant, which reveals one leg, and covers the second. Coupled with a half-skirt at Luar or half panties, half leggings for Rodarte, this piece to say the least surprising flourishes in the spring-summer 2022 collections. Even the Italian label Dolce & Gabbana succumbs to the trend, removing a leg of a cargo model during its fall-winter 2022 show.

Although unusual, the half-pants is a coquette place on a dozen podiums this season. But it is the NBA floors that saw it arrive first, more than 20 years ago.

We are in 2001, when the equipment manufacturer Under Armour markets the first single-leg leggings intended for the basketball players. Thought to protect a fragile knee, the garment of contention quickly finds its place in the stylistic panoply of the basketball player. Today, it's fashion's turn to put a leg out, in a quest not for care but rather for uniqueness.

"We're living in a time of questioning the system," designer Sarah Aphrodite tells Harper's Bazaar magazine, who herself removed a leg from one of her designs. "Cutting into a pair of pants is also a way to put our habits into perspective," she continues. An artistic approach that will raise the asymmetrical pants to the top?