Khakis

Khaki trousers changed everything. In the 80’s and early ‘90’s, when the jeans giant Levi-Strauss started to produce them, khakis became the common denominator of all dress codes. It was okay to wear them with anything, and to any occasion. They became grey, olive, brown, blue, and black. They are the fundamental element in Level 2 dress. And for Mr. Everyman, they are a great blessing: comfortable, easy-to-care-for, and relatively inexpensive, but truly functional and versatile.

Khakis are great. And to ease communication we’ll stretch the definition of “khaki” here to include cotton pants of every color. If you wear them with a patterned sport shirt, let’s say, or a knit shirt, and with a nice belt and clean shoes, you will look neatly put together. You can wear them with a blazer or a patterned sport jacket to a Level 3-style occasion; or with an oxford button-down dress shirt, tie and no jacket for the proto-preppy, all-American look. In short, they have an almost infinite variety of possibilities for wear and they should be a staple of every guy’s wardrobe.

One major caveat is required here: cotton trousers wrinkle. In fact the overall unkempt appearance of a lot of men starts from the ground up. A sturdy, carefully finished khaki will be easier to care for, but beware of the loosely woven, softer and more crushable varieties. Pants made of materials like this rarely make it beyond Level 1, because as we ascend these theoretical stages we are becoming continually more conscious of our overall tidiness.

 I am not one to lament the passing of tired and stale, worn-out conventions. I champion innovation and novelty. But it seems to me that there is something innately human that calls for looking neat. Some uniformity is necessary to make our culture cohesive, to give the individual a sense of belonging to something, of being someone. A wrinkled man is a non-conformist, true, but his disorderly appearance almost never seems intentional; rather, it appears as though he has no intentions at all. 

Okay. You get it. Neatness counts.

Make sure they’re ironed. Get them hemmed to the correct length. This is difficult, because they shrink, so it’s better to wash them a couple of times before you finish the bottoms. That’s right. Take them home, launder and dry them twice, then bring them in for alterations. It’s the only way to be sure. Have a bit of a break over your shoe. If you prefer to have no cuff, tell the tailor to hem them like dress pants, not with the seams showing like they do on jeans. And if you’re going to wear them to any Level 2 or above occasion, make sure they’re pressed and creased. Oh, and by the way: make sure they fit.

This is tough for a retailer, because khakis aren’t very expensive generally, and they don’t have enough mark-up in them to afford a lot of alterations, but by golly, khakis should fit you. Not “cinched-up” looking in the waistband under your belt, not too baggy in the butt, not too tight or too full in the thigh. No matter how much or how little they cost, if you expect to use them for anything over a Level 1, at-home event, they should look tailored 

FYI     Khaki is a color. Actually it started out as the color of Indian dirt, the Hindi word for “dust.” Cloth of this color was long ago made into military uniforms, adopted by British soldiers for wear to dressier occasions on the Sub-Continent, and then into trousers, which returning G.I.’s wore on Saturdays, from Levittown to Los Angeles. The cloth and the color are now almost infinitely varied as to shade, construction, weight, and composition. There is every imaginable variant, from a yellow-brown, ochre shade known by Americans as “British” khaki, to a sort of ecru shade.

Khaki, it is generally agreed by cognoscenti of such matters, is an all cotton cloth of twill construction which is piece dyed (i.e., dyed after weaving,) to a dull tan with a slightly olive cast.

“Chino” was the name English soldiers gave to the light weight cotton material their uniforms were made of while fighting the Boxer Rebellion. It was apparently invented to be ruggedly comfortable for the campaign in China.

The English, as you can see, invented everything.