How to Fold Dress Pants (Wrinkle-Free for Suitcase and Drawer)

Pick the pants up by the waistband at the back center and let them hang straight down. Gravity does the first bit of work here - it pulls any twists out of the legs and lets the fabric settle along the natural front and back creases that were pressed in at the tailor or dry cleaner.

Don't try to fold pants you've just yanked out of a wad on the chair. Hang them for a few seconds first. If they're badly wrinkled, a quick shake or a few minutes on a hanger does more for the final fold than any amount of smoothing later.

Pinch the waistband at both side seams and bring the two side seams together. The pants now hang as a single flat layer with one leg laid over the other, the back creases aligned along the rear edge, and the front creases stacked along the front edge.

Hold the pants out away from your body so you can see the front of both legs at the same time. This is the orientation that lets you check the crease alignment in the next step - you can't fix what you can't see.

This is the move that keeps a crisp pair of dress pants crisp. The front crease of the top leg has to sit directly on top of the front crease of the bottom leg. Look at the front edge of the folded pants - the two creases should appear as a single sharp line running from waistband to cuff.

If the creases are offset by even a quarter inch, you'll iron in a second crease next to the original one and end up with that double-line down the leg that everyone notices and nobody can explain. Slide the top leg forward or back until the creases stack, then pinch the alignment with one hand while the other smooths the cuffs.

Lay the aligned pants flat on a bed, dresser, or other hard surface and smooth them down from waistband to cuff. The pants should now look like one long, single leg with the waistband at the top and the cuffs at the bottom.

Press the front crease flat with your palm to lock the alignment. Work from the waistband down to the cuff - any air or bunching trapped in the middle gets pushed out the cuff end rather than locked into the fold. Take an extra second on the knees, which is where the fabric is bulkiest.

Bring the cuffs up to meet the waistband and fold the pants in half along their length. You're left with a flat rectangle about half the original length, with the waistband and cuffs lined up across the top edge and the new fold at the bottom.

For a longer trip, fold in thirds instead of in half - bring the cuffs up to the knee crease, then fold the waistband down over the cuffs. Thirds takes a little more room in a suitcase but the fewer creases at each fold mean less wrinkle pressure on the fabric.

Smooth the folded bundle one more time and set it aside or stack it in your suitcase. The aligned creases inside the fold stay locked under the weight of anything packed on top - shirts, sweaters, even a pair of shoes won't shift the pants out of alignment once the fold is closed.

Repeat the same hold-hang-align-fold sequence for every pair you're packing. The trick scales to a full suitcase exactly the same as a single pair - five pairs of dress pants stacked on top of each other still come out wrinkle-free as long as each one was crease-aligned before it went in.