These Brown Uniqlo Pants Work for a Lot of Us
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The latest Uniqlo C collection launched earlier this month, and a gem has quietly emerged. Strategist senior writerMichael Zhaoattended a press preview, where he tried on the unisex100 percent cotton-twill barrel pantsin brown. They were such a hit that he’s already written about them twice — in theSecret Strategistnewsletterand in his new advice column, “Ask a Picky Guy.” “Coming out of the changing room, all the publicists were fawning over how they looked, like I was some kind of celebrity,” he says.
Zhao has been on the lookout for pleated pants à la Jeremy Irons’s Charles Ryder in the 1981 BBC miniseriesBrideshead Revisited. So far, the Uniqlo C barrel pants are one of two front-runners, along with NN.07’s heavier, more structured pair that’ll cost you about five times more.
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So, since he liked them so much, and since they are marketed as unisex, I stopped into the closest Uniqlo to try them on too. (Consider this a follow-up to ourQuince coat-testing adventurethat also featured an excellent brown fashion find.) The pants come in four colors: brown, off-white, black, and navy. They all looked great in person, but I took brown and off-white into the fitting room, thinking they would look nicest in both professional and casual settings. I guessed at my size and grabbed a small and a medium in each color; for reference, I am five-seven and usually wear a size 29 or 30 in women’s jeans. Michael is quite a bit taller than me, at six-two, and the mediums were the perfect length, with just the slightest crease where they hit his Blundstone boots. So I anticipated the pants would be too long for me and arrived at the store wearing a pair of lug-sole mary janes that give me an extra inch or so in height.
I did have doubts about how good these pants would look on my body versus Michael’s — they’re made of cotton twill, which in my experience doesn’t really follow curves or drape all that well on people with hips. But as he wrote in “Ask a Picky Guy,” the twill is thinner and lighter than what you would find in a classic pair of cotton-twillchinosor officer’s pants. Plus the barrel cut is known for working well on many body types. I tried the size small first and was pretty impressed; they did not feel like men’s pants that women can also wear, and they immediately made me feel stylish and cute. They were also an ideal length; the size chart lists a 29 and 1/2-inch inseam for size small, and a 30 and 1/4-inch inseam for medium, but you can choose to have the pants altered, at no charge, to any length between 16 and 29 inches in half-inch increments. Off the rack, the size small hit me around ankle height, just above my shoes. But they were a little tight on my belly and my hips, just enough that they didn’t lie flat from waist to crotch and showed the line of my underwear in the back. I still liked how they looked, but I wasn’t getting the same relaxed fit as Michael or as theUniqlo model.
When I tried on the medium, I immediately felt freer. In this size, I could wear them lower on my hipsorhike them up and use the clever inner drawstring to cinch the waist and get rid of any gapping. However, now the pants were too long, and I had to roll the cuffs once to get them to break nicely or twice for a more cropped look. That’s not too much of an issue, though, since Uniqlo offers hemming for free; I also think these pants would be fairly easy to hand-sew since the fabric is pretty sturdy and stiff.
The sizing was consistent across the brown and off-white pairs. The off-white ones, especially, would be a very nice summer pant and fun to style with sandals and heels. The one thing to know is that they also showed more creasing, and I could see my underwear through them, so I prefer the brown color overall. But next time, I’ll style them with a less matchy-matchy shirt and hat so I don’t look quite so much like a UPS driver.
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