I bought these black trousers for a costume back in 2006. They fit me well enough and looked appropriate for our Ouran High School Host Club cosplay group. I adopted them into my regular wardrobe after that. What’s been bothering me the last few years has been that the flare is not really my style (also, they’re a skosh short on me, as you can see in the comparison up top). I decided to do something about it.

Basically what I did was take out large triangles on each side of the leg. You can see the lines I made on the sides in the left photo. I’ve read some tutorials (which I didn’t really follow) about people trying to do this and the legs “rotating” or something, and I don’t think I quite managed to avoid that. In the right image, you can see the outside seams sort of migrating around to the front. But it could just be due to the fact that there’s a whole bunch of extra material still inside the legs, since I hadn’t cut & pinked the seams yet.

Now that I’ve got those out, I just need to hem the pants! Thankfully I had a lot of hem to work with—about three inches. Annoyingly, I haven’t quite been able to press out the original crease. It’ll probably always be there. But honestly, who is looking at your cuffs? I’m not going to be in judgement in front of Tom + Lorenzo any time soon.