1970s? Your jeans are calling

I lusted after jeans with long, wide legs in the 1970s. I have a specific memory of an ad that featured an impossibly leggy young woman wearing such a pair. If she had feet, it wasn't apparent; the hem of her jeans skimmed the floor around her (no doubt) very high platform shoes.

I thought this photo might pop up on the internet but sadly it did not. Instead, I found a bunch of snaps that will show you the general vibe, capturing my wish for my current sewing project. 

The essential features:

• The waistband sits at the actual waist.
• The hips are snug but not skin tight.
• The legs are wide and flared from the hip. 

I remember the lore of tight jeans. New blue jeans were dark, dark blue. The indigo would always migrate to your skin. The denim was thick. It had zero stretch, except for whatever relaxation you could hope for, over time, from the twill weave and 100% cotton fibre. The pants were so stiff you expected them to stand up and walk around by themselves. 

Ease was not desirable. To put them on you squirmed and held your breath. You inched the zipper up as you tucked yourself into them. Then you tried to wear them for normal activities. I heard that some people would sit in a tub full of water wearing their brand new jeans and then wear them while they dried, in an effort to get them to stretch and mold to the body. Eventually, the jeans might relax and become comfortable.

Now I'm not saying I had a pair that tight or resorted to these shenanigans. I wasn't a cool kid. Nor do I want to reenact any part of the must-wear-too-tight-rigid-denim-jeans-victim-of-fashion scenario. I just want comfortable high waist jeans that evoke my longed-for 1970s silhouette. 

Somewhere I came across mention of the Dawn Jeans from Megan Neilsen. With the exception of the (IMO) too-tight crotch and bizarrely fashionable cropped length, they looked promising. 

I also had heard of the top-down-centre-out fitting method and thought I'd give it a whirl.

I noted that the Dawn Jeans are meant for "rigid denim" and that for my hip size, which put me in size 8, they were allowing a miserly 1 cm of ease. Sorry no - see above re too-tight victim-of-fashion. The young woman in the pink jeans on the website does NOT look comfortable. So I immediately went for size 10 as my base. 

I'll spare you photos of the TDCO fitting process but it was interesting. I found that to make the crotch a comfortable length and to get the leg to fall straight, I had to add about 2cm to the length at the front waist and reduce the back length by even more than that amount. So the front rise needs to be longer and the back quite a bit shorter than the original pattern in order to have a level waist. 

I haven't done that to other jeans patterns, but now that I look at the 5 year old pair I'm wearing (Morgan jeans) I note that the back waist sits a lot higher on me than the front - from the side the waistband is very tilted. The only reason this works OK is that they are lower rise. With pants that are supposed to sit at my waist, there would be no place for all that extra back length to go. Imagine an incredibly baggy butt and all kinds of unattractive back leg wrinkling. 

Despite the TDCO expectation that you can get well-fitting pants without having to adjust the crotch curve or insteam, I noted that the front crotch on my one-legged muslin was pulling sideways and once I added a smidge of extra fabric there, I really wanted to add a cm of fabric at the inseam, to both front and back, to make the crotch curve less narrow front to back. Also, the extreme straightness of the upper inseam on these jeans, as drafted, just looks wrong to me. 

My TDCO muslin told me to take out so much back waist length that I didn't believe it. So I made a two-legged muslin with the pattern adjusted for slightly less of a reduction. 

And ... found that I did in fact need to pinch out exactly as much as I had added back and that the waistband was also too big. Proof at left. 

This gave me the confidence to adjust the actual pattern and cut it out in some denim I have lying around. In fact, it's the same very low stretch black denim I made the Morgan jeans out of in 2018. Now, as then, I feel like there's nothing wrong in having a little extra ease. 

To be continued.