Open Edit The Icon trousers are cut long and full through the leg in twill, which is a very different garment from the stretch ponte pant they replaced. Twill matters more than it sounds: it has enough body to hold a crease and enough weight to hang rather than cling. The variations here are mostly about the waist, moving from a defined high rise to a pull-on band to a cigarette line that narrows below the knee. The lineage is menswear tailoring filtered through the 1990s, when Helmut Lang and Prada made plain trousers the interesting part of an outfit. Skinny jeans held the market for roughly fifteen years, which is an unnaturally long run for any silhouette, and the correction was always going to be this wide.

Same Icon twill, two very different legs. The cigarette pant is narrow to the ankle for flats, while the flare opens from the knee and wants a bit of heel under it.

Outside the Icon line the same principles show up in other fabrics. Puckered crepe gives texture without pattern, faux leather takes the same wide leg somewhere sharper, and ponte keeps a flare comfortable enough for a long day. Split hems are the detail doing the most work right now, because they let a wide leg break cleanly over a flat shoe instead of pooling. A knit pant reads casual from a distance and tailored up close, which is the exact register most offices settled into after 2020. The range is unusually coherent for a house label, which is why the trousers keep selling out.

The split hem knit pant sits closer to loungewear but still holds a line at the front. The Muse ponte flare has more weight, so it keeps its shape through a long day.

Nordstrom's own label is doing something most house brands do not, which is committing to one silhouette and cutting it properly. The Icon is worth the attention because the rise is genuinely high, not high in the way marketing copy means it. Get them hemmed. A wide-leg trouser that is two centimetres too long looks borrowed, and almost every pair off the rack is. If you only take one, the high waist wide leg in twill is the one that behaves like a real tailored trouser.