Pant Development

by 97617205 August 23, 2014

Pants are hard. It's hard to find great pants and it's hard to make great pants. I've been shopping the market for great pants for myself forever, but for the purposes of developing pants for The Willary I started in February. See, it's easiest and most cost effective if you can go into your sample shop with a fit sample, that is a garment that already fits great, and make your adjustments based on that. To be a contender for our fit sample, the pants had to fit around my hips and not gape at my waist, not be super low-rise, have a basic straight leg shape, and not pucker around the front of my hips. I shopped high-end to low-end, high-tech outdoor brands to basic jeans and still struck out.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600.0"] I gathered these in one day of recon. You'd think there would be a winner somewhere in here...[/caption]

In May I brought 3 pairs to my sample shop and asked my pattern maker to Frankenstein a mock up out of each pair's best attributes. After a ton of pattern revisions and 5 mock-ups we're finally ready to sample our pants in one of our choicest fabrics. To give you an idea of how serious we are about making these pants great, this last alteration was an 1/8" adjustment on the waist band. 

[vimeo 104189825 w=500 h=281]

eighth inch from Debbie Baer on Vimeo.

When I think about all the effort it's taking to get the fit right it doesn't surprise me that there aren't more great pants out there. And really, our goal at The Willary is to put so much thought into our clothes that you can completely forget about them once they're on. 

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