Help! I Know I’m Meant to Be Wearing Baggy Jeans, But I Really Don’t Want To

Winter has well and truly come for millennial denim.

The klaxon has well and truly sounded. What was once merely passé is now unforgivable. The skinny, nay even slim jeans which were once the high-water mark of millennial aspiration have been free falling out of fashion for several years now. But today they have reached the point of mainstream risibility and even the most immovable fashion ostrich is going to find it hard to keep their head in the sand.

Underlining the point with great clarity, this NYT piece ‘Why are Pants so Big (Again)’ captured the turmoil well. After reading it, the part I took most to heart was how jeans are a true symbol of the Zeitgeist, encapsulating ‘the moment’ like a kind of ‘Patient Zero’ of fashion’s spirit, as writer Jonah Weiner describes. Also, that jeans are a great leveller, or a kind of cultural currency which nearly everyone thinks they understand. For a whole generation of us, ‘our’ jeans now mark us out as past it. Mum jeans (as in embarrassing, dated and not something anyone even only moderately hip would consider wearing) are no longer Topshop’s ‘Mom Jeans’. They are anything cut even moderately close to the leg. While this swing has been coming at least since the pandemic (I ditched my own skinnies and graduated to tapered straight legs during the interim) it is now impossible to avoid. Winter has come.