Short shorts make for long legs: ladies’ lederhosen

Ladies’ lederhosen? Yep, they’re around. And more than just that: they’ve actually been a thing for quite a while now. And although they haven’t made a mass-market breakthrough just yet, 2014 looks set to be the year in which they become very popular, very fast. Until last season more the territory of adventurous Munich fashionistas, ladies’ lederhosen look set to become ubiquitous this year as ever more of us decide to stuff convention and get into leather.

And there was never a more exciting time to do so than now.

Why? Because the inventiveness and adventurousness of female designers and wearers has revitalised the traditional lederhosen. We girls are simply more open than your average guy to new cuts, colours, and materials, and so the producers are giving it all they’ve got. After all, most guys say that their leather breeches are for life, not just for the year. But for us, it’s more a case of worn today, gone tomorrow. And with all these fun new models out there, why the hell not?

Cut

The first ladies’ lederhosen that came out a few years back were just that: lederhosen for ladies – i.e. reserved, well-behaved. Most of them were in retiring colours like camel or moor, and all of them came down to below the knee. The very idea of women in leather breeches was shocking enough, we suppose… Now, however, the lederhosen for ladies have been joined by lederhosen for fashion conscious women and fun-loving girls: that means new above-knee cuts and even hotpant-style leather short shorts – generally as leather pants. If you were wondering, these are going to be the story this summer.

Colour

While the most popular colours for guys’ lederhosen are called things like “old brown”, “antique”, or “tobacco” – and live up to these monikers – producers of ladies’ lederhosen have now worked out that we don’t need our lederhosen to be limited to a “old man pub palette”. No, in 2014, you can pick and choose between girly milky pink and wild berry, fashionable green apple and blue moon, or show-stealing milky turquoise and risk red. And that’s before we’ve even got to talking about the decorative stitching, which is also present in a whole variety of colour combinations. In fact, rather than picking/choosing just one, I think we’re going to need a few…

Materials

For generations, the only materials options for Bavarian leather breeches were goatskin for newbies, buckskin for experts. Want to try something else? Not happening! But we girls don’t have this tradition weighing on our shoulders, so you’ll find ladies’’lederhosen in everything from soft, traditional-looking suede (like the original hit Stockerpoint models, Elfi and Jacky) through to goatskin and nappa. Nappa, in fact, is the really exciting development, offering as it does a smooth shiny finish. That means that it not only attracts attention with its sheen, but repels fluids – a not unimportant characteristic in a beer tent…