The Wide Leg

High wide waistband, a leg that pools on the floor, a knit one size loose, a chunky sole under all of it and a bag worn across the body so both hands stay free. You dress from the waist out rather than from the shoulder down. Every fastening you own is either elastic or generous, and you can tell within thirty seconds of putting something on whether you could sit on a train in it for four hours.

The good news is that comfort turned out to be a durable brief rather than a temporary one, and the high wide trouser in heavy cotton is the single most useful shape any of these six years produced. It works on more bodies than the peplum, it works in more weather than the slip, and it is the only silhouette here that a person over sixty and a person under twenty are both wearing this month.

The hard part is that your outfits have no waist and therefore no news in them. Volume over volume flattens a body into one soft rectangle, and the chunky sole, which was doing something interesting when the rest of the outfit was narrow, now just adds a second layer of bulk at the floor. One narrow thing would fix your entire wardrobe and you have been avoiding it for five years.