~wearing pants at your natural waist when possible will help
Damn I JUST learned this after getting Dickies 874's and Ben Davis Original's in the mail and being so confused trying them on.
When pants (like dickies 874) say they sit AT THE WAIST that means at the natural waist. Which is NOT around your hips. It's way higher -- just below the belly button for most people.
I have shorts, and pants that are supposed to be worn below the waist, that I wear really low, like just above asscrack. This has thrown me off for years, thinking I was supposed to wear Dickies and other high rise pants that way and finding them SO tight in the waist. I was just wearing them too low.
Dickies even threw me off because their 873 sits below the waist, like most other bottoms I wear, so I thought that waist size was going to fit me in the 874 if I wore them that low. They won't, because they're not meant to be worn that low.
Maybe this was obvious to everyone else but I'm literally just now discovering that alot of these pants are made to be worn high as fuck.