I always wear this one pair of pants on every single flight: They’re called the Faye Pant from Ann Mashburn. They’re a thick cotton with a lot of lycra and a wide elastic waistband that doesn’t dig into the midsection. They have just enough of a tapered flare (I refuse the legging on the plane — I don’t want to look or feel like I’m wearing exercise clothes), and they also show some ankle, so they don’t look like yoga pants. I first discovered these pants when I was at the Mashburn flagship store in Atlanta years ago. My husband was doing a book signing there, and I had hours to kill, so I tried on a ton of things and fell in love with these pants. A couple of years later, I started seeing High Sport on some of my friends’ feeds, and they looked so good I knew I had to try them. They’re basically the same idea as the Faye pant, but I like that they have a front seam, which makes them look a bit more ’60s ski pant. I splurged — I think they were $850, but I used the price-per-wear justification, even though I couldn’t believe any pair of lycra pants could cost this much. A part of me thought that they had to be invincibly good if they were going to be that expensive — and since everyone I liked (well, at least on Instagram) was saying how perfect they were … they had to be? I brought them home and fell madly in love with them — until I had to wash them. Now, since these were going to be my daily workhorse pants and be my new travel pant, of course I was going to wash them. While the label said to dry-clean only, I figured I would wash them and not dry them, because if I can’t wash these pants that are supposedly great for travel, then what was the point? So I washed them, and that was the end of the High Sport for me. The black isn’t black anymore, the fabric got saggy in the knees and almost flappy in the flare bottom.
I was so mad. I literally got four wears max out of these pants, which means over $200 per wear. The Mashburn pants (which are around $250) don’t lose their color, and they don’t get saggy. I don’t dry them, I just wash them, and they’re perfect. I have them in navy and black, and I’m on my second pair of each — sometime in year three they started to show their wear — but that is after wearing them probably at least 50 times a year.
Some more black pants we’ve written about…
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