2008 Comeback Stories: Pegged pants

This post is part of our series on people, places and things that have found new life in 2008.

I was a child of the seventies, so my grade school pictures are liberally sprinkled with earth-toned turtlenecks, polyester leisure suits, and bell-bottoms. The thing is, though, when I was a kid, I didn't see these as styles or fads. They were just clothes, like meatloaf was just food or my dad's AMC Hornet was just a car. This means that when bell bottoms came back a few years back, I didn't feel any real sense of nostalgia. For me, it was like they were brand new.

When it comes to fashion, though, the one constant is that each generation's sartorial disasters inevitably find themselves dragged out out of the closet and regurgitated for the next group of suckers. Soon enough, people were sure to tire of resurrecting the seventies and would switch their focus to the eighties.

Pink clothing for men hasn't really made a comeback yet, "Members Only" jackets are still on the outs, and I've been spared the sight of leg warmers (at least for the time being). However, narrow ankles are once again on the march. The bastard child of a thousand GAPs and a few dozen teen-oriented flicks, the narrow-ankled look had two standard variations: the first version was the infamous tapered jeans. These were generally used for day-to-day wear. Sturdy and durable, their tight silhouette and awkward cut made wearers seem gawky and vulnerable, yet stylish in a spidery kind of way.