By Kelsey Ables
Call up the office workers with closets full of sleek, dark denims, the washed-up punk rockers whose tight pants could pass as compression gear, and the millennial moms who recoil at the idea of wet ankles in the rain – skinny jeans are not dead.
Take it from Levi’s chief executive Chip Bergh, who said on a Wednesday earnings call that the company’s top two selling styles for women are skinny jeans.
“I’ve been known to say skinny jeans will never die,” said Bergh, who also called wider leg styles “definitely the trend” before adding that the “skinny jean has not gone anywhere”.
He would know: Levi’s is one of the world’s largest denim companies and reported sales in the fourth quarter of 2022 that beat expectations.
Trend-watching companies echoed the sentiment. In 2022, demand for skinny denim picked up, with the return driven by millennials, who were not willing to compromise between comfort and style, heading back to the office and their social lives, said Marguerite Le Rolland of Euromonitor.
“I don’t think skinny jeans will ever go out of style,” said Diana Smith, who analyses retail and e-commerce trends at Mintel, adding that the denim cut was a “classic”.
To loose-fit evangelists who have – since at least 2020, when comfort became the priority during pandemic lockdowns and denim brands struggled for survival – been declaring skinnies uncool, that may come as a surprise.
But data suggests that when skinny jean stalwarts say they aren’t giving them up, they mean it. What’s more, these slim-fit fans aren’t always approaching middle age.
Sure, for much of Gen Z, born between 1997 and the early 2010s, skinny jeans belong in their mothers’ closets. As they near or enter adulthood, they’ve come to prefer leggings or wider-legged, relaxed, once-frumpy “mom jeans”.
Meanwhile millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, assert that they’ve been there, worn that, and know better.
Carolyn Mair, the London-based author of “The Psychology of Fashion”, is not surprised by the strong feelings.
Denim was previously “associated with rebelliousness and the working class”, she said in an email, adding that jeans still “serve as an outward portrayal of who we are and which social groups we identify with”.
On the internet, a difference in tastes has ballooned into an identity war. One popular TikTok video that promises to tell viewers how to wear skinny jeans features an influencer throwing the pants down a stairwell.
When the occasional Gen Z-er shares their affinity for skinny jeans on social media, they strike an almost confessional tone.
“I’m gonna say it. I like wearing skinny jeans. In fact, I would even say that they are comfortable,” Morghyn Walker, a 20-year-old in Savannah, Ga., wrote on Twitter last week.
“You can make them classy. You can make them casual. They’re so versatile,” she said on a video call. While many of her peers insist that baggy jeans are more comfortable, she said that they trap humidity on hot days. Besides, when skinny jeans fit right, why bother taking them off?
“You haven’t had a good sleep until you’ve had a long day at work, you got a pair of skinny jeans on, and you just go to sleep in those skinny jeans,” she said.
Depending on who wears them, both skinny and “mom jeans” can be fit for napping, their fans say. Wide-legged jeans are “in line with the loungewear boom” of the early 2020s, says Le Rolland of Euromonitor.
But some skinny jeans are also surprisingly stretchy. Levi’s top two sellers for women both contain traces of synthetic material that give them elasticity.
As athleisure became more popular in the 2010s, millennials and Gen X-ers saw skinny jeans as an in-between option that was more formal than leggings, but also had a sleek feel, said Emma McClendon, a fashion historian who curated “Denim: Fashion's Frontier” at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
She said there is a good chance skinny silhouettes are on their way out, but that it would “take time to fully convert the most ardent slim-fit wearers”.
Osmud Rahman, a fashion professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, said in an email that skinny jeans are embedded in the cultural fabric of the 2010s, “which may also represent a different stage of life that people may not necessarily associate with now”. (Many Gen Z-ers spent a good part of the 2010s in elementary school.)
Wanga Ramuhuyu, a plus-size model in Johannesburg, associates her favourite skinny jeans with something more than trends. The 22-year-old avoided denim for years, fearing that she would not find the right size.
But a few years ago, “I was in the fitting room at the store trying a pair on for the first time, and I just cried,” she said.
They were light-coloured, high-rise skinny jeans and made her feel confident. She doesn’t plan to give them up any time soon.
When Ramuhuyu got into fashion, she said she was met with opinions that it wasn’t appropriate for larger-size women to wear cropped shirts and skinny jeans.
She resisted them. “I just tried everything to prove to myself that I can break boundaries,” she said. “I can start my own trend.”