Tracksuit bottoms and me have a complicated past.

When I was in school, ‘Poppers’ meant one of two things: a type of drug and a type of jogging bottom. Both these things were critical in the determination and maintenance of the adolescent social order.

Poppers drugs were the preserve of the most skanky students, not the fake ‘bad’ kids who had access to weed (the middle class, predictable even at this age), just the real skanks. The social affiliation was therefore, on this criterion, fairly easy to establish. Poppers jogging bottoms, however, were a more duplicitous variable.

As with all quandaries, let’s define our terms in the first instance. Poppers were tracksuit bottoms (jogging pants, joggers), with a vertical strip of press studs (‘poppers’) to each leg.

Something like this:

So, there were three critical fashion events of the academic calendar in the 1990s. Firstly, school trips, but these were thankfully scarce for my year group after a disastrous outing to the zoo in Year 7. Secondly, non-uniform days, again scarce in their truest form, thanks to routine sabotage by the charity brigade – dress in your pyjamas, wear your uniform back to front, dress as Mr Blobby…[snores]. But the third event, a yearly occurrence, was the hardest to avoid of all. As a nod to the era of the school’s inception in the 1970s, traditional sports uniform (including a skirt for girls) was strictly monitored.  That is, until the annual period towards the end of January, when the P.E. teacher could ignore the blueish hue of our legs no longer and the critical decree was issued: “girls may wear their own jogging bottoms for sports until further notice”.

As the jogging pants emerged from boot bags in the changing room, it was as though a power source had been applied and the established molecular hierarchy of the class made vibrant and re-ordered again. Simply put, your joggers determined your status unequivocally; your joggers defined you. The particular appeal of Poppers was the ease with which they were ‘popped’ open by boys, to reveal the pre-nubile legs of teenage girls and waft the whiff of depilatory cream around the classroom – a kind of sartorial courtship, if you will.

Most sports brands of the 1990s dabbled, but really, Adidas Poppers were the only ones to countenance. Less cool variants were, in order, Kappa and Le Coq Sportif. Also just about acceptable, were non-popping versions of the same brands, or Reebok or Umbro, at a pinch.

But my jogging bottoms – navy blue, baggy up-top, tapered below, from “Ethel Austin” – didn’t pop and didn’t feature at all in the spectrum of tolerable possibilities.

Could social status really be decided by a series of formless crotches? It seems so, and to seal my fate, on account of my tall stature (my downfall once again), I had to have the man’s version, which included enormous fake flies (the urinary kind) stitched into the front. Not even real flies, not even with a single, real popper.

But, no matter. As with the many traumas of adolescence, I thought I had made my peace with joggers and finally got them where I wanted them. I relish giving the finger to good taste, decorum and the Popristocracy of 7GH, in my most lewd Juicy Couture, but only during binge-watch or flight, naturally.

And yet, today is the day that everything changed and the battle lines between me and the great shapeless ones are drawn once again.

Apparently, Spring’s key Power Pairing is…the jogging pant and the high heel, something like this:

OK, let’s remain calm. There are those fashion trends that are wrong from the start: showcased on the catwalk, attempted by celebrities and then quickly forgotten. My early analysis is that this of that nature and my warning level at this stage simply, “be aware”.

But, let it be known that the day I see this…

is the day we launch an all-out offensive. And having already laid siege against the Popper-Slappers of 7GH, I am ready.