Leather trousers are not for the fainthearted. They come with … baggage? Mythology, perhaps, is a gentler way of putting it. Either way, you know what I mean. Leather trousers can be suggestive of pelvic-thrusting rock frontmen. Noisy motorbikes. They hint at midlife crisis or teenage rebellion. They are a lot.

But leather trousers – along with gym clothes in public and cancelling plans at the last minute – have been normalised in polite society. There is a new breed of leather trouser-wearer. You know who I mean: she looks as if she could be an architect, perhaps. She is chic and understated (neutral colours, not too much jewellery) and she’s wearing a nice pair of trousers that just happen to be leather, rather than wearing leather trousers in a let’s-get-the-shots-in kind of way. Again, if you know what I mean.

The thing is, when you get them right, leather trousers have a kind of magic. They have the power to make you look just that tiny bit cooler than everyone else in the room. They can be a brilliant style shortcut. They just need to be handled with care.

First, you need to make peace with the fact that people have opinions about leather trousers. Remember when Theresa May was photographed for a Sunday newspaper wearing a perfectly nice pair of chocolate brown trousers that happened to be leather? The world lost its mind about this for a good fortnight. If you wear leather trousers, the odds are high that someone will make a facetious comment about them being a bit racy. This is slightly irritating, but price it in, smile and move on.

Second, go for a generous cut. It will feel better, for a start. Nobody needs to be sweating and squeaking in their trousers. It will look better, too. At a basic level, there is something animalistic about the messaging of wearing leather. This is true to pretty much the same degree whether the leather is real or fake, since most of us can’t tell the difference. If the leather is second-skin tight, then it looks like a body part when it moves instead of like fabric. This means that when skinny-legged shapes are in, leather trousers look very raw and primal. But at a time like now, when generous cuts are in vogue, you can wear them without looking as if you are on the prowl.

What to wear with them? Don’t think about a specific style or colour, but rather a mood. That mood is calm. Leather trousers can feel a little theatrical, and what we are trying to do here is to chill them out. In fact, the best way to style a pair is to try to forget they are leather, and dress as if they were regular trousers. What this means, at a granular level, is that instead of scanning your wardrobe for a rock’n’roll, raunchy top to match the energy of your leather trousers, reach in the opposite direction.

The coolest partner is a top half that lowers the temperature a little. A fluffy knit is ideal, or a simple T-shirt. As a top layer, a wool peacoat or a chunky cardigan is a good bet. (It all gets a bit lord-of-darkness if you wear a big overcoat over leather trousers.) Be mindful of the accessories that will be part of your look, but which you won’t necessarily see in your bedroom mirror. For example: there is a very good chance that your handbag is black leather. And that your favourite loafers are black leather. If you are wearing black leather trousers, you might want to switch one of those accessories for a different colour or fabric, so as not to get too Matrix-coded.

They are just a great pair of trousers that happen to be leather. They look sharp late at night when lesser trousers have wilted. They make you look like you’re not trying, even when you’ve actually thought quite a lot about what you’re wearing, which is one of the best tricks any garment can pull off. All you need to do is play it cool.

The Guardian

Last Tuesday, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola lost to Real Madrid in a £270 shirt.

The grungy flannel number from the cult Swedish menswear brand Our Legacy was so noteworthy it consumed more post-match oxygen than the news that Manchester City had been dumped out of the Champions League before the quarter-finals. Never mind that Guardiola is beginning to look bereft of ideas for the first time in his career. All anyone cared about was whether he’d hired a stylist.

It’s hard to imagine a footballer’s outfit generating this much attention, but where male managers are concerned, certain rules are still very much in force. This week’s Carabao Cup final against Arsenal at Wembley saw Guardiola wearing a navy turtleneck and brown wool herringbone trousers, an outfit that waged a deliberate campaign of gen X reinvention. Having revolutionised basically every aspect of the English game in his decade at City, it seems his final revolution is changing what it’s possible for a manager to wear on the touchline.

But was Pep’s shirt a sign of a genuine shift? Rather than quiet quit with months of the season still ahead, and speculation growing that it would be his last, was he opting to embrace the din with a knowing smile and air of self-expression? Or had he simply given control of his wardrobe to his gen Z influencer daughter.

Traditionally, aspiring managers have two wardrobe options: the tracksuit and baseball cap of a training-ground drill sergeant, or the dark suit and tie of a man who sees himself at a remove from his players.

This binary began to crumble in the mid-90s with the arrival of Arsène Wenger. The debonair Frenchman married an air of sophistication with a bookish, bespectacled look that quickly earned him the nickname Le Professeur, only to be replaced by an insistence on wearing extremely long sports coats. The Wenger coat became a streetwear staple and, before Pep’s recent intervention, was undoubtedly the most iconic piece of managerial clobber in British sporting history.

Where Wenger’s look said cerebral, José Mourinho’s said something altogether more dangerous. The handsome Portuguese manager arrived at Chelsea in 2004 radiating a kind of louche authority that said: beneath the Armani suits and perfectly tied scarves, I am hard as nails. No wonder women loved him. His teams were ruthless, pragmatic and, in those early years at least, victorious. The sartorial peacocking was an alibi of sorts – a cover for the grim efficiency that characterised the way Chelsea played.

Guardiola has always been fashion aware. He briefly modelled for Catalan designer Antonio Miró, while starring in Barcelona’s midfield. As Barcelona manager, from 2008 to 2012, he wore dark, knife-sharp suits and a shaved head, lending him the look of a sort of footballing monk. At Bayern from 2013 to 2016, he largely disappeared into club kit, his personality subsumed to an extent by one of Germany’s most enduring cultural institutions. His arrival at Manchester City in 2016 brought fashion from Rick Owens, Stone Island and CP company – younger, more culturally fluent, but still utilitarian.

Daniel-Yaw Miller, fashion and sports journalist and founder of the SportsVerse newsletter, agrees the shift in Pep’s wardrobe this season is emblematic of a new phase in the legendary manager’s career. “He’s reached that point when people start thinking about the years beyond management and style is often a tool to communicate that – to signal that they’re ready to have a bit more fun,” he says. “With Pep specifically, it feels like the handbrake has come off. You see it in how he is with his players, in his press conferences, and now in what he’s wearing,” says Miller.

His changing looks are also in stark contrast to the younger managers in the premier league. Mikel Arteta, a former assistant of Guardiola’s at City, has spent his Arsenal tenure aggressively seeking gravitas through quarter-zips and cashmere sweaters. Liam Rosenior has been roundly mocked for his failure to bring coherence to a talented Chelsea side while wearing hoodies under his suit jacket and designer glasses. Brighton’s Fabian Hürzeler’s look is even more extreme. Just 31 and younger than several of his own players, he dresses less like a manager and more like a student swinging by the gym after lectures.

So, the question of whether any of this actually matters remains. “Football managers are the most neurotic, detail-obsessed people – they don’t leave a single thing in their preparation to chance. It would be naive to think what they wear doesn’t fall into that,” says Miller. He draws a parallel with Lewis Hamilton, a man who had a terrible season in Formula One last year but who remained central to the cultural conversation around his sport through savvy dressing at race weekends.

What a manager wears is ultimately a statement about how he sees the game, and his place within it. Wenger saw himself as an intellectual. Mourinho saw himself as a star. The tracksuit managers of yesteryear saw themselves as sergeants. Pep, it turns out, is something else entirely now – a man who has won everything there is to win, and knows that the conversation about what he’s wearing is probably more interesting than whether he’s any good at his job.

The Guardian

You would think primary shades would be the easiest colours to wear. Red, yellow, blue: we can name these before we can tie our shoelaces. They are not sophisticated colours, such as Armani greige or Pantone favourite Mocha Mousse. They are not challenging-to-wear colours, like chartreuse or mustard. They are Mr Men colours. So wearing them must be child’s play, surely.

And yet they are weirdly tricky to wear. They can feel shouty and basic: the getting dressed equivalent of speaking loudly without saying anything particularly interesting, which is – to paint it in primary colours – not what any of us are aiming for.

Muted colours have dominated fashion for a decade. Navy, grey, black and denim have been the backbone, with highlights of butter, olive green and soft pink the shade of a freshly plastered wall. But over the past year, uncomplicated shades have made a return to the catwalk. At fashion week, I had got used to trying to figure out the best way to capture an unusual shade in words – is that skirt bramble, or mulberry, or perhaps diluted Ribena? – but I’m now seeing colours that need no introduction. This jumper here is just red, no fancy qualifiers.

Adding an in-between colour – in the form of the classic work-shirt blue of the sleeves – serves as a bridge

At the Celine show at Paris fashion week, there was a rugby shirt in blue and red with a white collar; also, a blue shirt tucked into a yellow miniskirt. At Alaïa – the home of chic, inky black – there was a red skirt-and-top two-piece and a yellow trench. At Prada, there were practical boxy jackets in cheerful yellow and green, the sort of coat shades that would look more at home hanging on animal-themed pegs outside a nursery classroom than on the Milan catwalk. At Loewe, moulded dresses came in pop art splashes of blue, yellow and red.

What works on the runway does not necessarily translate into the real world, but here are some tricks that do. Take another look at the red knit in the picture above. If all the other elements of the outfit were monochrome, the red would look harsher. Adding an in-between colour – in the form of the classic work-shirt blue of the sleeves – serves as a bridge, visually, between the dark trousers and the bright jumper. Denim is a great option. A bright coat or jacket, for instance, looks more suave if you wear it with jeans. Perelló-olive khakis are a good foil for a primary-toned knit top.

You might feel that you are on the safest ground wearing bright colours with black. This works best if the black pieces have an element of drama. A blue blouse with black trousers? Yes, but can the trousers be leather? High-waisted, perhaps, or extra wide? If you are wearing one attention-grabbing colour it is tempting to think the rest of your outfit should be bland but, in fact, a bright-meets-black outfit will have more balance if the black feels like a style choice in its own right.

If Lego colours feel a little too attention-grabbing, wearing them on the bottom half of your outfit turns the volume down. A bright skirt with a white shirt feels bold but not silly.

Texture helps to temper too. A blue in brushed mohair or a yellow in rich crepe will appear more grownup. Texture gives the colour somewhere to sit, rather than leaving it to shout into the void.

Scale matters too. Traffic-light colours look more deliberate in confident shapes. A neat little cardigan in scarlet can feel apologetic, whereas a generously cut sweater in the same reads as purposeful. Accessories are a useful entry point if you are not yet ready to commit. Even better if the accessory has a bit of personality of its own – think exaggerated proportions, interesting hardware.

Primary colours do not have to be worn solo. Red and blue feels classic, almost collegiate. Blue and yellow is fresh and surprisingly flattering. The key is to avoid introducing too many tones at once: two is confident, three is risky, four is a cry for help.

The Guardian