Wear Whatever F-ing Jeans You Want
We are not obligated to live under the tyranny of 'denim anxiety.'
On Monday, Business Insider published an article titled “Millennials’ mom jeans era” — arguing that wearing skinny jeans now make us “look old” and are the modern day equivalent of the jeans we supposedly used to make fun of our mothers for wearing, while also noting that they are due to come back in style any day now.
Because everyone is doing everything wrong!
Millennials, welcome to your mom jeans era. I don't mean that you're obligated to wear the jeans you made fun of your own mother for wearing 20 years ago. Those are actually cool now! The uncool fit is those skinny jeans you practically slept in during the 2010s. Oh, and Gen Z, before you laugh, that combo of loose-leg light-denim jeans and white sneakers you love will date you soon enough. And to the teens sporting the modern-day version of JNCO jeans, your Gen X aunts don't know whether to feel proud of you or laugh at you behind your back.
Well, just to be clear, mom jeans started being cool again over a decade ago, around 2015, largely due to the tendency of Millennials to take all non-cool things and make them cool. But please, go on!
Jeans are a staple of most people's wardrobes. The garment is a durable, democratic basic — a versatile piece that, depending on how you style it, can be worn to the grocery store, a night on the town, and even work. Jeans are also among the most fraught and volatile attire we own. For an item thought of as timeless, jeans are anything but. Waistlines rise and fall, legs widen and narrow, and what felt modern just a few seasons ago can suddenly seem embarrassingly outdated. And because jeans are worn so often and sit so closely to the body, these shifts can feel quite personal.
The whole article is about our supposed collective “denim anxiety” that the author is pretending has been a constant throughout the years, how we all switch out our uncool jeans for the latest cut, how “your pants may be designed to last, structurally, but they’re not meant to endure, culturally.”
“The fashion industry builds in this social obsolescence,” the article quotes Carolyn Mair, “a behavioral psychologist who specializes in the fashion business” as saying. “However well we try to phrase it, looking old is something that most people do not aspire to.”
Except I would actually argue that the very concept of “social obsolescence,” when it comes to fashion, was itself obsolete up until around 2020, when it was first “announced” that it was no longer cool to part one’s hair on the side. Part of the reason we were so shocked by this, really, isn’t so much that we liked parting our hair on the side so much as that it had been a very long time since any of us had lived through the “Someone said this isn’t cool anymore, and now we must all stop doing it” shuffle that we found it jarring. Then it all came in like a rush. Skinny jeans were out! Specific water bottles were in! Nope, now that water bottle isn’t cool anymore, better go get this one instead! Nail art is out! “Old money” nails are in! Cut creases are out! Clean girl aesthetic is in!
For all of the things that Millennials were blamed for “killing” over the years — casual dining chains, diamonds, bar soap, doorbells, canned tuna, McMansions — we have been far less militant about what was “out,” fashion-wise, than almost any other generation before (and now after) us. Sure, there were things that fell out of use for a variety of reasons, but we had a good few years there in which any attempts at fashion policing were more or less completely ignored. This is not to say that “trends” didn’t exist, so much as there was no social pressure to follow them if they weren’t your thing. Things were in but nothing was ever really out.
I attribute this to two things. First, the mainstreaming of thrifting led to people being able to buy whatever they personally like and want to wear rather than being beholden to changing trends (and for a lot less money). Second, a reaction to having had our bodies and clothes so overpoliced for so long. It didn’t happen all at once, but I’d say that by 2008 (by no small coincidence, the year of the financial crisis), we all kind of came to the collective conclusion that everyone should just do their own thing. We listened to our own music on our iPods instead of the radio, we started streaming whatever we wanted to watch on Netflix (which premiered in 2007), and we wore whatever we felt like wearing.
In fact, 2008 was the first year that skinny jeans were declared to be “out,” while the slouchy, baggy Current/Elliott boyfriend jeans were meant to be the “it” jean of the moment. The expectation from the fashion industry was that we would all immediately swap out our skinny jeans for these, and we just … didn’t.
Every year after that, the fashion elite would declare skinny jeans dead, and every year, we just kept wearing them. But not just skinny jeans. People wore straight-leg, bootcut, flares, baggy jeans, cropped jeans — depending on what was right for them — and no one really gave a shit. Hell, we had nearly a full decade of the same color being the “it” color no matter what Pantone had to say about it.
In 2016, RetailDive reported that “Shoppers still want skinny jeans, and that’s a problem for retailers,” citing, among other things, the CEO of Urban Outfitters complaining that there was no longer sufficient pressure for women to fill their closets with brand new clothes.
On a conference call with analysts last week, Urban Outfitters founder-CEO Richard Hayne put his finger on a problem that is vexing many apparel retailers these days: there’s no real reason for women to fill their closets with new clothes, and jeans are a major part of that.
“The last major fashion shift was 10 years ago when the skinny bottom returned to popularity,” he said. “Since then we’ve had all varieties of skinny...Today, the customer has a closet full of various skinny bottoms and she has many many long tops and sweaters to go over them. Without a fashion need to drive her purchases, the customer can easily defer her apparel spend.”
Heaven forfend! Because the giant landfills full of fast fashion in Chile and Africa just aren’t big enough. They need to be much, much bigger.
There is something so deeply fucked about threatening women (and, to be clear, it’s nearly always just women) with “looking old” or “dated” or becoming “obsolete” if they don’t dutifully follow every trend or pay attention to the rapid fire of TikTok “aesthetics,” if they wear the wrong jeans, if they part their hair the wrong way. It’s terrible for the environment, it’s bad for our own self-image, and it’s bad for our wallets. It’s also some fascist, capitalist bullshit.
I mean, there is a reason why Elon Musk, of all people, complained about the lack of a unified aesthetic that we all follow. People who want everyone to be the same in one way usually want everyone to be the same in other ways as well.
It’s easy to deride “fashion” as a stupid concern for stupid people, but it’s just as political as anything else. It concerns issues of labor, feminism, the environment, capitalism, and society in general. It has been used as an expression of freedom and a tool of control. And it says a lot about the times we are living in that people once again think they can get away with threatening women in this way without being told to fuck right off.
There is no reason why, after so many years of freedom from the constant cycle of “in” and “out,” anyone should suddenly start playing this game again. Sustainability is more important now than ever, and we absolutely should not be rushing out every season to “fill our closets with new clothes.” Our planet literally cannot take that.
Wear whatever the fuck jeans you want. If you want to wear skinny jeans forever, wear them forever (or until they fall apart). If you look better in bootcut, wear those. If you never want to wear jeans at all, don’t wear them at all. They can’t have rules if none of us decide to go along with them.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
"Wear whatever the fuck jeans you want."
I'm embracing my 50s DGAF phase, and have bought Adidas tracksuits, one colour for each day of the week. Years ago, I happened to meet Tony Bennett in Central Park, and he was wearing an Adidas tracksuit, green with yellow stripes, and I said to myself "One day I will be as cool as that old motherfucker".
Isn't the entire world of fashion journalism built on the idea how everyone is dressing the wrong way anyway?