Know Your Flat Front from Your Pleated Dress Pants

The front of your dress pants can be flat or pleated, but do you know which is best for you? The DeCalo Fashion expert is here to help you select the best fitting dress pants.

Flat front dress pants look nice with long jackets, and remain popular in the US in spite of a decline in Europe. Some tailors feel that the only way to keep pants up is to use suspenders and, indeed, the use of suspenders for comfort seems mandatory for many men who wear flat front dress pants.

Pleats tend to make dress pants fit better by allowing the extra range of movement for seated positions (the pant tends to widen when seated). Dress pant pleats are created when the fabric is folded and stitched at the waist, and come in a variety of combinations. The classic pleat is a single fold centered on either side of the zipper. This gives a nice, elegant appearance seated or standing. With one pleat per leg, you can have dress pants that are cut narrow and fit well.

Double pleats provide a more generous amount of fabric for larger men. Double pleated slacks tend to look better while standing than do flat-front dress slacks, but when seated they can appear baggy. An Italian wide-cut jacket looks nice over double-pleated trousers, where a thinner single-pleated dress pant would appear too thin.

Dress pant pleats may also be inverted, which means that the pleats in the dress pants do not face the same direction.