Ragas Report: Trendspotting

Gauchos do not call their gauchos “gauchos.” That might be reason enough to avoid these pants — that they reduce an entire proud-if-impoverished people to a pair of preposterous-looking culottes. But being that those people, the gauchos of Argentina, are the same nomadic folk that brought us the poncho, we are absolved from worrying about their feelings. If last year’s poncho feels a bit ­ridiculous right now — if it felt a bit ridiculous last year, too, but you shrugged it on anyway because everybody else did — then you have a pretty good idea of how those gauchos will feel next year, or 10 years from now, when you come across old JPEG files of yourself wearing these silly pants. But even that prospect can’t compare to the yellowed photographs I have of my mother, circa 1975, clad in gauchos and poncho together, an undignified look indeed, which makes one wonder what sort of knife-wielding, self-respecting cowboys would rock that look. The answer: the gauchos. The same guys who brought us the poncho. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.