Z. Cavaricci
The pleated, high-waisted, tapered pants with the white Z. Cavaricci label running down the fly, so nobody could miss what you paid for. They ruled the mall from the late 1980s until the trend collapsed in 1991 and nearly took the company with it.
Jim Cavaricci launched his label in Los Angeles in 1982, and by the late 1980s the Z. Cavaricci name had become, in Women's Wear Daily's words, "synonymous with its low-yoke, loose-leg pleated pants." The signature style, later marketed as the Cateye, had a high waist, deep pleats, roomy legs that tapered hard at the ankle, and a vertical white label stitched along the zipper. That label was the point. Worn with a tucked-in shirt and a wide belt, the pants announced themselves from across a food court, and the trade press later recalled that they caught on first with the Los Angeles and New York club crowd before pop stars and then the mainstream picked them up.
For a few years the company was enormous for a pants maker. Cavaricci said in 1991 that the brand had sold three million pairs of the Cateye, and he has put its peak at about $140 million in revenue; in 1996 he told WWD the business had been doing $170 million before it fell to $60 million. The pants themselves were the memory: an early-90s middle-school hallway of pleats, and the friend whose parents finally caved and bought the real thing instead of the department-store knockoff.
Then the look died. WWD dated the end of the trend to 1991 and reported that it "took the company down as well." Cavaricci rebuilt slowly with basic five-pocket jeans and a juniors business; by 1996 the company ranked fourth in junior denim behind Levi's, Guess and Calvin Klein and expected about $100 million in sales, a comeback that never returned it to the mall-defining status of 1989. Around 2008, by his own account tired of being "beaten up" on price in juniors, Cavaricci closed the company and walked away.
The pleats came back the way everything does. In August 2017 the brand marked the Cateye's 30th anniversary with a limited run of Cateye reproductions, made in Los Angeles and sold online for $225 to $245, and by 2018 it had showroom representation again. The revival traded on exactly the memory the originals left: a decade of photos in which everyone's pants were pleated to the ribcage.
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