Great style is all about your waist. Not in a don’t-those-models-eat-anything sense. But rather, as a dapper man once told me, because where a man’s trousers sit reveal whether he knows how to dress himself. For what seems like forever, trousers have perched precariously on the hips, threatening at any moment to fall to the floor. It’s an unflattering place to wear your kecks, one that stretches your torso and shortens your legs. In hip-huggers, even tall and slender men seem dumpy.

But the winds are changing and over recent seasons, trousers have crept upwards, towards a man’s natural waist. The trend has been spearheaded by Italy’s tailoring colossi – Armani, Cucinelli, Caruso – and comes twinned with the long overdue drift from skinny to more billowing legs. That’s because to pull off more relaxed trousers (you can stop the spit-takes now, they’re happening) those acres of extra fabric need a decent distance to fall.

These shifting winds have blown a long-lost – but much-missed – detail back into fashion: the pleat. Until recently, ‘pleated’ was kicking back on the same scrapheap as ‘bootcut’, ‘square-toed’ and ‘wraparound’, an adjective that no one in the know wanted anywhere near their wardrobe. Your grandfather wore pleated trousers because pleated trousers were comfortable. You poured yourself into skinny jeans that buffed off leg hair, because when did comfort and style ever play nice?

Well, right now. We’re in a wonderful new world of work-joggers and cardigan-blazers, to which the pleated trousers return the seventies, the fifties and the twenties like a shunned prophet, ready to forgive us our flat-fronted sins. “They’re fantastic for the wearer as they offer complete comfort in the way they allow volume in the seat of the trouser, whilst looking formal and neat,” says designer Oliver Spencer, whose recent collections have been particularly pleat-heavy. They create the one thing there’s never enough of these days – space.