How To: Rip Off Ripped Leggings

Ripped Leggings are, like, totally, cutting edge! (Pun intended, har har). If you heart The Eighties as much as I do, youre obvs considering buying a pair. Big mistake. Huge.

With an Xacto knife and an old pair of black leggings, it's easy to rock the ripped trend without paying for it. Read on, chickadees.

Try old pair of black leggings on, and determine how high on the leg you want your cuts. If youve been wearing short skirts sans tights all summer, go higher; if youre just not that into bearing your upper thighs, start an inch or so above the knee. Mark your line with a pin or a piece of chalk or a pen or whatever.

Using either duct-tape or the palm of your non-cutting hand as leverage, secure one leg of the legging on a hard, flat, indestructible surface (read: wooden cutting board). With your Xacto Knife (Fiskars Fingertip Craft Knife is my personal fave), make a small horizontal test cut - NO MORE than an INCH AND A HALF in width - at the foot end of the leg.

This exercise will illuminate the power of the Xacto knife, as your cut will probs slice through the front and back of the material to the surface you're working on. This is okay, as long as you keep your cuts short. If your slice spans the full width of the legging, you risk hacking off the material entirely and having nothing to show for your DIY dalliance as a result. I'm just saying.

I highly recommend using a JPEG of a trendy overpriced pair of ripped leggings (see shopbop.com) to guide your cutting and dicing process.

Do your best to mimic whatever style of cuts you choose, but don't flip out if what you end up with isn't a carbon copy - there's something to be said for originality. We just want to end up with something similar in appearance to its $125 counterparts, is all.

Pretend your leggings are a delicate pair of stockings as you pull them on. This will prevent your feet from getting tangled in the web of your creation's cuts.

Once you've got your ripped leggings on, do a little jig, and marvel at the joy of indulging in trends for free.