If you take a look back at 1980’s fashion, you’re likely to come across stretch stirrup pants. These pants look like regular leggings but they have a strap that goes around the heel so they stay in place. They are also very colorful and come in many different designs, some with a huge waistband, others without.
Originating in dance studios, stretch stirrup pants somehow made their way onto the market, and with their popularity growing, more and more clothing manufacturers decided to make them as colorful as possible so they would suit every taste, no matter how old you were.
80s Stirrup Pants
During the mid-80’s, stretch stirrup pants were made to give your legs length and make them look thin, but this didn’t always work as the pants occasionally tended to be quite baggy. The fact of the matter is these pants created a triangular effect, which made the wearer look bigger from the waist, while their thighs looked large, and their ankles small.
This would have been ok if you could have hidden the affect it had on your waist and buttocks with a shirt or a jacket, but more often and not the shirt or jacket would have been tucked into the waistband, or they simply weren’t long enough to hide the effect of the pants.
The Rise Of Stirrup Pants
Although these pants became popular in the 1980’s, the fad lasted until the early 1990’s as they were thought to be an essential item of clothing for any woman to have in her wardrobe. The good things about stretch stirrup pants are they were very easy to wear, you could just slip them on and place the straps around your heel.
If your pants happened to be particularly colorful, they could be worn with a plain top so there wouldn’t be too much color. Believe me, these pants were very colorful at times, and it wasn’t unusual to see someone walking down the street wearing a pair that looked almost like a patchwork quilt.
Stretch stirrup pants were also very comfortable to wear too, and they started to replace a lot of jeans and other pants that were tighter and not necessarily that easy to move it. These pants were great for those times when you just needed to relax and unwind. You could put them on, forget about your hard day, and let the relaxation begin.
What’s more is stretch stirrup pants were also great to wear when you visited clubs and bars, they looked good, they were the height of fashion and they were easy to dance in. Anyone who wanted to be noticed wore a pair of these pants, including a long list of movie stars, TV stars and pop stars that were more than happy to pose and dance in a pair.
Are Stirrup Pants Still Popular?
Although 80s stretch stirrup pants were popular in the 1980s, they have definitely fallen off as a fashion accessory. People moved away from the stretchy materials of the 1980s, and stirrup pants was a casualty of that.
For now, the popularity of stretch stirrup pants seems to be stuck in the 80’s, but we know it won’t be long before they find themselves a place in 21st century clothing stores once more. Retro fashions have an odd way of coming back, and we believe stirrup pants will eventually return one day.
