I love wearing dressier trousers, and have a good assortment of them in my wardrobe. You can see the exact items in the collection below. Generally, I wear the first four pairs in Autumn and Winter, and the other five in Spring and Summer. I wear the black cropped flares, red trousers, and floral pants year round when the weather is mild.
I feel great in trousers. Better than I do in jeans. They are dressier, more comfortable, and I think they look more flattering. Yet I reach for blue and white jeans a lot more often for two reasons.
- Jeans are easier and cheaper to maintain: This is the bigger reason of the two. I can throw jeans into the laundry, air-dry them, and give them a quick press. All but one of my pairs of trousers needs to be dry-cleaned, which is more costly and less convenient.
- Jeans don’t crease: I don’t reach for my blush and citron trousers as much because they crease during the day, which drives me bananas. It’s a shame because they’re fun styles that look wonderful at the start of the day. The other seven pairs, on the other hand, are remarkably robust and barely crease at all. In fact three of them are crease-resistant.
I could restrict myself to crease-resistant trouser fabrics, but I don’t want to limit my trouser purchases to machine washable styles when the ones that require dry cleaning fit better, feel better, are a more interesting silhouette, and look more pristine. Because of my line of work, I am extra particular about outfit polish and how things fit. If that’s off, I’m going to be unhappy with my outfit. So dry-cleaning is a fact of life.
I do want to break out of the habit of wearing jeans several times a week when I could choose a pair of fabulous trousers. In fact, it’s going to be one of my style goals this year to wear trousers more frequently. I’ll do the dry-cleaning because life is too short to not wear the items that make you happy. Of course machine washable styles will be my first choice as I add more trousers to my wardrobe. But I will not choose a machine washable style over a dry-cleanable one just because it’s easier to maintain. It has to look and feel just as good.
