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There are few items of clothing more divisive than the skinny jean.
Once a sign that you possessed both excellent taste and a CD wallet full of New York’s spikiest guitar bands, tight denim trousers fell into a devastating downward spiral around the same time everyone stopped listening to those spiky New York guitar bands.
From the mid-2010s onwards, the world at large started buying wider cut trousers. Or as James Harris, co-host of the ‘Throwing Fits’ podcast, puts it, “The skinny jean era was such a blight on society that the pendulum swung violently in the opposite direction.”
The pandemic famously got consumers prioritising comfort above all else, and these days — on TikTok, at least — the skinny jean has become shorthand for a very outdated, very millennial, sense of style. Illustrating that point, Agustina Panzoni, trends specialist at Gen Z-centric Depop, says the platform has seen “a staggering 1,500 per cent surge in searches for looser fitting jeans” since January of 2023.
According to consumer data company Circana, women’s jeans sales fell by 3 per cent in the US in the year up to September 2023; and for every $10 lost, $8 was down to the decline of skinny jeans. Retailers from Madewell to Gap have reported a dwindling interest in slim-cut denim, with customers instead opting for straight and looser fits. Pacsun pulled the style from its stores altogether, which feels like a bold move, but is perhaps unsurprising given that sales of skinny jeans dipped substantially compared to the overall denim market, by a whopping 22 per cent.
That said, if you were paying attention to the silhouettes at a number of Autumn/Winter 2024 shows, nobody would blame you for questioning whether the dog days of drainpipes might soon be over. Miu Miu sent low-rise skinnies down the runway in Paris, Balenciaga tucked incredibly tight denim into knee-high boots, and in London, Aaron Esh’s collection wouldn’t have looked out of place in mid-2000s Camden.
Away from the catwalks, there are, of course, still plenty of skinny jeans being sold. Online retailers like Asos and Mr Porter still highlight skinny jeans front and centre on their denim sections, and while sales might have dipped considerably, the style continues to represent 30 per cent of total women’s jean sales. While designers, publications and the slightly more fashion-conscious public have increasingly been favouring baggy over slim, millions of consumers have chosen to continue wearing what was on trend when they were growing up. Which begs the question: will skinny jeans ever truly die?
Google Trends data shows that worldwide searches for “skinny jeans” have been slowly grinding downwards since late 2016, while interest in “wide-leg pants” started increasing around the same time. According to Panzoni at Depop, searches for “baggy denim” have increased 247 per cent since this time last year, while customers looking for “barrel jeans” have jumped by 167 per cent in the last two months alone.
“I think we’ve all collectively realised that maybe [skinny jeans aren’t] the best, most flattering silhouette,” says Harris.
“Skinny jeans aren’t functional either,” adds his podcast co-host Lawrence Schlossman. “They don’t encourage general movement or activity — and since jeans are such an everyday staple, a stovepipe version of those is just not practical in the most foundational sense.”
The pair agree that, while there’s not been a dominant archetype in menswear since the hypebeast uniform of the mid-2010s, men who care about their trousers are most definitely going for roomier cuts. “A couple of years ago, you saw people trying to pull off Japanese fishermen-width jeans, and even people trying to make [denim brand] JNCO a thing,” says Harris. But the pendulum, they say, is swinging back towards a more middle ground. “To the wider side of your Levi’s classic 501,” says Schlossman.
Steff Yotka, head of content at Ssense, agrees. “I think we’re just past the peak of the widest jeans and on a trajectory back towards skinny,” she says. “Oversized clothing has been popular since Demna [Gvasalia] was still designing for Vetements [in 2019]. Once the market becomes saturated with an idea, fashion people instinctively want the opposite. You can see it starting to happen on the runways; something slightly narrower feels inevitable.”
However, the consensus is that — despite those recent runway appearances — straight leg and wider styles are here to stay. But plot twist: so are skinny jeans. The point being that over the last decade or so, we’ve progressed into something close to a post-trend era. A monoculture is hard to maintain when all information known to man is accessible from your pocket, so while the prevailing preference may well be for wider silhouettes, there are still pockets of the clothes-buying public for whom skinny jeans are all the rage.
“Some people are wearing skinny jeans, some aren’t wearing jeans at all — they’ve renounced denim,” says Schlossman. “There are trends, obviously, but there’s not just one dominant look.”
“Once upon a time, you’d have to take your fashion cues from celebrities, the red carpet, musicians, fashion collections,” says Harris. “Now, with access to imagery from anywhere around the world, you can take your inspiration not just from those hegemonic, top-down forces. You can discover some micro-subculture in 1970s London and replicate it or get inspired by it.”
“The fashion industry is now empowering people to have choice, which makes trendspotting sort of a dying art,” says Yotka. “However, I do think we’re trending back towards a moment of normalcy. Ideas like quiet luxury, or elevated basics, say we’re in a slightly fearful time, and we want our clothes to look less experimental and more normal.”
For the sake of argument, what would it take for both the industry and more fashion-forward consumers to accelerate the cycle and pivot back to the skintight extremes of the early 2000s?
“To really get things going, I think we’d have to see a celebrity embrace it wholeheartedly,” says Yotka. “If Harry Styles kicked off a new album cycle wearing skinny jeans, I think that would be the line in the sand that they’re back.”
Schlossman agrees: “It would be a hilarious [psychological experiment] to see, if quote-unquote modern-day fashion icons like Tyler, the Creator and A$AP Rocky put on skinny jeans, whether you’d see that trickle down to all the dudes that take their personal style cues from their favourite artists. To see them be like, ‘Oh, Rocky? Tyler? Skinny jeans? Let me try it out.’ And then just have a bunch of dudes walking around a major city, looking like dogshit.”
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