Surveillance cameras are everywhere keeping an eye on pedestrians or people as they navigate through the scene. Within this context, our paper addresses the problem of pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR). This problem entails the extraction of different attributes such as age-group, clothing style, accessories, footwear style etc. This is a multi-label problem with a host of challenges even for human observers. As such, the topic has rightly attracted attention recently. In this work, we integrate trainable Gabor wavelet (TGW) layers inside a convolution neural network (CNN). Whereas other researchers have used fixed Gabor filters with the CNN, the proposed layers are learnable and adapt to the dataset for a better recognition. We test our method on publicly available challenging datasets and demonstrate considerable improvements over state of the art approaches.