Low rise pants are nice because they deliberately exclude your waist from the ongoing argument about who can best hold up pants: waist or hips. But beneath their friendly, welcoming exterior and superior ability to display the lovely belly you have been cultivating, there lurks a hidden danger: camel toe. Whether or not you can see it, camel toe is a terrible curse. I imagine it must happen more now than ever, what with the Low Rise going lower than a diving sea turtle. For example, the crotch measurement on a pair of low rise pants can be as little as an inch if you happen to be Dorinha’s pants.
Incidentally, I have met Dorinha and she really wears those pants and high heels and everything. Crazy Brazilians!
Anyway, I have worn low rise pants for years, ever since I had my navel pierced. It just makes sense when you have a navel piercing to wear clothing that a) shows it off and b) will not snag. I have happily worn low rise pants in spring, summer, fall and winter without incident. But not until the Old Navy Low Waist Beige Capri pants of this summer (previously known as the Best Pants in the World, [and yes, many pants have held that title, and many still will] for approximately half of one day) had I experienced the discomfort and displeasure of the Low Rise-Inflicted Camel Toe Effect. (LRICTE) (that’s how it feels, basically.)
Perhaps the horrible working conditions under which the Pants were created is sort of ghostily haunting my lower body. I don’t know. I do know that there is only ONE pair of underwear in my current stable of, I’m sure over 400 pairs, that allows me to wear the Pants in peace. Every other pair of underwear; grannies, thongs, hipsters, boysters, boxters, all of them Bunch. Bunch is what they do. Gather all up in the lower waist area like poets in the lower east side.
The thing is: I loved the underwear so much I went back and bought two more identical pairs. The original underwear is grey; the new pairs are black and white, respectively. They claimed to be the exact same underwear, colour excepted, however, they are really not. They are really identical in appearance and wrong, so wrong, in fit. How does that work?
(The same way I am a size 12 at some stores and a size 8 (eight!) in others. I feel sorry for the girls who are now being re-classified as size -2 because the Marketing People want size 12s like me to feel like size 8s and buy more clothes to celebrate their mysterious, effortless weight loss.)
Lesson, then: If you fear for your crotchial security: test well any low rise Pants before you buy them. Sit down and pretend you’re typing 4 pages of minutes from a meeting where there was free coffee and your handwriting is all over the place and you thought maybe it would be fun to doodle the minutes instead of writing words. Then pretend you are talking on the phone to a person who thinks you are someone else and insists that you help him with his home inspection and no, it is not a come-on. Then stand up. Are the pants on you or, uh, in you?
Ah but you take my point, yes?
Beware the Low Rise. But don’t fear the reaper.
