Leggings Have Gotten Ridiculously Expensive

The pants of the season are leggings (we only consider them half-pants, but these days when it comes to bottoms, we'll take what we can get). Designers are churning out all sorts of styles, from sheer to patterned to embellished to suede. Leggings are doing things they've never done before! If their diamante patterns don't alert you to how special they are, their prices sure will. The price tags on leggings at Shopbop have blogger Cheap JAP in a tizzy. The mesh variety pictured here, by Robert Rodriguez, are $198. Cheap JAP:

Were one million spiders required to weave them? Had they too graced the legs of a socialite? No and no; apparently, two-hundred dollars is the going rate for designer-sanctioned mesh these days.


Patterned opaque leggings by Mara Hoffman cost even more, at $286. An even-sillier sequined pair by LaRok — called I Am a Rockstar Leggings — are $348 and sure to draw light to your every bulge!

But the truly must-have leggings of the season are leather, perhaps suede. A leather pair with mesh insets that have the potential to be very slutty, by Nuit, cost $850. Alexander Wang's (refreshingly opaque by comparison) Stretch Suede Combo Leggings cost $1,175. The prices on the leather pairs — excluding the sheer-paneled pair — don't seem completely absurd to us. After all, they're leather, right? We have seriously considered paying retail for a leather pair because they go with everything, should keep you reasonably warm, look cool, and are as close to pants as leggings come. Stare at fashion on the Internet all day every day and, eventually, paying four figures for all those things along with the designer label seems reasonable. This is why we are grateful for bloggers like Cheap JAP who bring us back down to earth when our mother isn't around to ask us if we're crazy. If we want leather leggings or mesh leggings or leggings with weird insets and cutouts and bedazzling, we may as well go to a sex shop, where they are cheap and we can get affordable thigh-high boots to go with them. And if we are high enough on fashion one day to think tight sequined pants are going to do us favors, we will try to remember to go to Forever 21, where they should cost $15 and fall apart at the same rate they go out of style.

The High Cost of Comfort: Shopbop’s Leggings Selection [Cheap JAP]

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