Type 117 Knitted Pyjama Trousers are shaped wide, and pulled in at the waist in the same way.

A drawstring can either be adjusted in use, as with a bag or trousers which need to be opened and closed, or can be employed to create ruching during the sewing process- as in early shirt sleeves, very wide up the arm and gathered to a narrow cuff, sewn in place with a stripe of lace. Some formal shirts, still, are drawn at the cuff in a series of very small gathers. Somewhere between these options are semi-permanent drawstrings, which are usually set initially and then tied off and left alone: curtain gathers are like this, as are traditional formal hats, which used to have laces running through the inner band to adjust the fit to the owner’s head (ratchet bands on industrial hard hats do pretty much the same thing). I don’t know but I would guess that the little bow of ribbon that you often see at the inside back of hats is a vestigial nod to these adjusters.

The constructional equivalent of a shirt cuff, trousers are often brought into a sewn-on waistband, allowing for a roomier top block (the thighs, seat, and crotch) and a clean waistband that pulls the garment in over the hips. In tailoring, if the fronts of the trousers are shaped they usually have a pleat or pleats in the middle of each front, and a dart or darts at the back. A dart is the same as a pleat, but rather than being caught at one end and left to hang open, it is sewn closed (usually from inside the garment), then pressed flat and often topstitched. Depending on the thickness of the fabric, the folded inlays may then be cut away. The advantage of a dart is that it gives a cleaner finish to the outside, which can also have a pocket sewn over it, as on the right side of these type 140 Cross Cut Trews Shorts. However you lose the flexibility of a pleat, which can hang closed or pull open as necessary. Darts need to be run off carefully when they are sewn: too abrupt of an angle results in a pointed end visible from the outside, known in tailoring as a ’tit’.

Pleats are quite often found in the front of tailored trousers, but they don’t really work with Tender’s diagonal front pockets, and to date I’ve not used them in the front of trousers. For type 122 Pleat Back Trousers and Jeans, however, I used the position and function of a tailored seat dart but opened it up as a soft pleat. The pleats face inwards, towards the back seam, the equivalent of front ‘English’ pleats (facing inwards towards the fly) as opposed to ‘European’ pleats, which face outwards to the side seams. The back pleat means there can’t be any back pockets on this style, but I like how the pleat sits with no pocket underneath, and how it relates to formal trousers for braces, usually cut without back pockets and pulled up at a similar point, where the back brace button sits. I’m really happy with how these have come out in deadstock English-woven corduroys, and my own pair in 16oz selvage denim is one of my favourites.

Where trousers volume is reduced up into waistband, jeans jackets often have pleats down in the waistband, so that the fit neatly at the waist but have more room in the body. The back of the type 903 Double Breasted Jeans Jacket has two outward facing ‘European’ pleats into the back of the waistband:

In a standard formal shirt, pleats are usually put in to the back, below the yoke, to allow a little extra fabric across the back, improving freedom of arm movement. Most Tender shirts are cut without yokes, and are pleated directly into the collar seam, at the back of the neck, either with an inverted box pleat (two inward facing pleats positioned so that the touch):

or with a single large asymmetric pleat, as with the type 462 Millwheel Shirt:

Equivalent to these shirt back pleats, but more overt, ‘action back’ pleats are a standard feature of certain sports jackets, cut in at one of both shoulders, for reaching forward to shoot a gun on traditional British hunting jackets, or to ride a horse (Wrangler jeans jackets). These pleats are typically held back from inside with a strip of elastic, so that they don’t stay opened when the arms are relaxed. A similar idea (although loosely based on a nurses pinafore I saw at the Fashion Museum in Bath) the front and back panels of the type 473 Sack Shirt are cut very wide and pulled in with deep pleats at the shoulder seam:

I haven’t discussed shaping through seams, which is the most obvious technique, although historically less preferred, as unlike pleating or darting it involved irreparably damaging the fabric, which could otherwise be reused and was more valuable than the garment itself. A last word, then, to a particularly subtle way of taking out shape, which I particularly like: where a fabric’s warp and weft shrink differently they may be sewn together flat and then allowed to create shape when the garment is washed. Waistbands are usually cut down the piece of fabric, where the waists that they fasten to are usually across the piece. In this hemp-wool-cotton Bull Denim type 602 Edited Jeans Vest the waist is softly, but definitely, gathered into the waistband, which has pulled in as the cotton warp yarn retracted when the garment was dyed: