Fashion's little fancy pants

Local label Cybele puts on a good show with its own palazzo trousers. Photo / Supplied

A lesson in how to wear palazzo trousers - without stilts.

The trouser shape of the season is the palazzo - so wide legged it might reasonably be described as billowy and so long the best way to wear it is possibly on stilts.

It is an unusually grand fashion statement - the clue's in the name, suggestive of a languid, willowy aristocrat swanning around a crumbling Renaissance castle in the 1930s.

This, then, is the absolute antithesis of the low-slung, skinny silhouette that continues to dominate at street level, at least.

While a high waist and wide leg might seem difficult at first sight, it is only our lack of familiarity with it that makes it so.

Narrow trousers, borrowed from menswear and best worn by the snake-hipped because of that, are far more distorting when worn by a woman - hence muffin tops, visible underwear and constantly having to pull one's trousers up. None of these is chic.

Conversely, and perhaps unsurprisingly, on the catwalk wide-legged trousers look like they were made for easy living.

At the spring/summer collections in Europe, Haider Ackermann's satin palazzo pants were reminiscent of nothing more than the most luxurious pyjamas and are designed to be worn with kimono jackets cinched tightly at the waist.

At Celine, Phoebe Philo teamed her wide-legged trousers with everything from moulded leather vests to oversized men's dress shirts, laying to rest the theory that a roomy cut on the bottom half necessitates a narrow one on the top.

Dries van Noten had crisp, white cotton palazzo pants with a tie waist worn with a sheer chiffon shirt and ivory tailored jacket, whispering of vintage Yves Saint Laurent.

Marc Jacobs' sugar-pink, wide-legged (and leggy) silk trouser suit was quite the prettiest homage to the Seventies imaginable - think of Bianca Jagger, only drenched in sugar and spice.

The challenge here is, in fact, not at the hips but at the hemline. For anyone lucky enough to have legs like a fashion illustration, this might not be an issue. The rest of us will almost certainly find we have to alter our new purchase before wearing it, losing a good few inches from the leg.

Cut palazzo pants too short and Katherine Hepburn becomes Coco the Clown. Your trousers should graze the floor even when worn over the highest heel in your wardrobe.

- INDEPENDENT