Where did you get those red round mouth shoes? I typically only see them in
black.
SaiyaJedi wrote:Sayo-chan wrote:Something I noticed years ago was how we occasionally see characters wearing a sort of zoot pants. I know they came back into style during the 80s in America, parts of Western Eruope and Japan, but I didn't think it would extend into Dragon Ball. We see Vegeta wearing them here:
This my favorite type of slacks, so I have a bunch of them.
They're not "zoot pants", so much as ordinary dress slacks, which are designed to sit at the natural waist (slightly above the navel). Vegeta's aren't even particularly high-waisted, although I don't know that his glutes or his thigh muscles are really big enough to warrant the double pleats.
The low-waisted "jeans" look for dressier trousers has been in fashion for a number of years and has made this style less common, but they've never gone away completely. The trousers of a "zoot suit", in contrast, would go up even higher and also be extremely baggy around the legs, since the whole point of that style was extreme exaggeration.
I wouldn't exactly say ordinary, at least concerning today's standards, but you're right that they're not
actual zoot pants. I said a "sort of zoot pants" because they share characteristics seen with the reinvented zoot look prominent in that time period, not necessarily that they are zoot pants (mainly because there really isn't an all encompassing name for what I'm talking about). I suppose I should've been a bit more careful or specific with my phrasing. In the anime, the pants don't exhibit any of the attributes they do here (and as such I would refer to those in specific as ordinary), but here we see dropped belt loops resulting in the "paper bag waist", which is something not really seen with ordinary dress slacks anymore, let alone with pleats. However, today's norm is not what yesterday's norm was. Pleated pants with dropped belt loops used to be fairly common (and mocked if on
jeans), but I think the influence here is clear, which is what I was touching on.
Sometimes the bottoms were
tapered (which is how mine are as well), so not all zoot styled, or influenced, pants have extra room at the hem like
Kuwabara's. I think it's important to note that every incarnation, unless entirely copied (as with Yu Yu Hakusho), is subject to a variety of changes. Viktor and Rolf for example in 2010 created a sort of
neo-zoot pants. In a way, this is the sort of reimaging I'm referring to that took place in the 80s and 90s, with the main differences here being that the 2010 style didn't stick nearly as long or have much of a variance. More than anything, high-waisted pants were simply the standard back in the 40s, whereas every decade onward it became less and less. We don't exactly see many people with pants like
Humphrey Bogart anymore. Even then, a lot of
reproduction zoot suits have lower waists and higher belt loops, which to my knowledge also started in the 80s. Regardless, the 80s/90s had a lot of
experimental clothing that borrowed these attributes and applied them in a variety of different ways, which can also be seen on
Botan to compare and contrast with Kuwabara's above.
We see this sort style worn by
Akane and
Ukyo in Ranma 1/2 as well, but with varying waist and belt loop heights. Most notably we can see the OVA exaggerates the manga's style
here, which is far more reminiscent of the original style. In Sailor Moon we also see a variance of this on both
Mokoto and
Rei. What Mamoru's wearing in the first image is actually fairly similar to what's considered to be normal now and far more common then, but not all that similar to Vegeta's beyond the pleats. This is mainly because the tab of your average pair of slacks shouldn't have any sort of concave shaping to it when hugged by a belt. We can see this is a distinguishing factor between Vegeta and Krillin's pants here:
However, in the later panels, the belt loops do seem to magically touch the top of the tab, somewhat (but not entirely) eliminating the concave look:
It could just be the perspective though.
Most Dragon Ball fans are incapable of making a logically sound argument.
