I have finally found practical pants for women! They are the 5.11 Wyldcat and I am wearing them right now. What are you wearing?
So this is kind of my first gear or clothing review, and hopefully the first of many.
I’ll put the most important information near the top: I really like these pants. It’s only day one of wearing them, but so far they are living up to the excitement. As a side note, it’s a bit of a wild punt ordering pants online from the US without the ability to try them on or even a practical way to return them without a whole lot of postal strife. But these looked so good on the website that I had to take the risk. They have eight pockets!
As any practical woman will know, pockets in pants is an ongoing, if not worsening, problem for women. My jeans used to hold my phone in the front pocket when I was wearing Wrangler straight cut in about 2009 and had an iPhone 3Gs. But since then pockets seem to be getting smaller at about the same time phones get bigger.
All of my Levi’s have a hole where the sharp corner of my 5S has worn through the pocket.
Back to the Wyldcats. My phone is in the front thigh pocket and no longer cuts into my hip when I sit down. I have dog poo bags in the left rear hip pocket, my wallet (might post about that one day) in a back pocket and keys in the very spacious front hip pocket (the kind most jeans have). I still have three unused pockets plus somwhere I can stash my hands. These are my dream pants.
If you’ve never seen these pants, by now you’ll be pictuing some baggy cargo pants in a desert tan colour, no doubt. Well, I chose the Grenade colouway because all my jeans are black. Don’t worry, I plan to get these in black too. And they’re the opposite of baggy. In the pictures on the website, they look downright tight on all the models, but a size 12 for a size 12 person is that nice kind of skinny where you get the skinny cut without all the cling. They are a tad loose at the waist but I have a good belt.
And everything about the fabric is true. The best way I can describe it is like old-school moleskin pants. Really soft and flexible but in no way thin. When I first took them out of the packaging I was immediatly struck by all the stitching. Tripple rows along the hand pockets.
I’ll edit this post if anything changes after a wash and some more wearing, but chances are you’ll be reading about my next pair instead.
UPDATE: March. I noticed a bit of stitching starting to give way on the inner thigh just after writing this. At the end of March I’m still waiting for customer services to get back to me. I still want to buy another pair, but I feel like I should wait for the verdict on this first. In the mean time, I put a couple of hand stitches in to stop any more undoing.