Lifestyle
So long, skinny jeans. See you in the next cycle
There is some reasoning behind the life and death of a fashion trend.
Image by Alicia Zheng/NPR
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Image by Alicia Zheng/NPR
There is some reasoning behind the life and death of a fashion trend.
Image by Alicia Zheng/NPR
When Moe Black was a teenager, you could wear only one style of pants.
“If you wore anything besides skinny jeans, you were, like, weird,” said Black, now a 29-year-old fashion content creator. At the time, skinny jeans had fashion and pop culture in a stretch-denim chokehold.
Black recalled taking style cues from the stars she saw on MTV and VH1, telling NPR she looked to bands like Green Day.
“A lot of these bands were anti-government, anti-war,” she said. “And I felt like the way that they dressed was such a symbol of what they believed.”
Her uniform: dyed hair in a side part, oversize graphic tee, checkerboard Vans and jeans so tight they looked painted on. But as ubiquitous as they once were, skinny jeans are out. And looser, 1990s-inspired styles are in.
So, what happened?
It’s not just pants that come and go. Everything from shoes to color palettes to entire aesthetics cycle in and out of style. And keeping up with it all can feel dizzying. But there is some logic to how it all works.
The life and death of a trend
The life of a trend starts with a trendsetter.
“It’s traditionally started with designers and the people that are making the clothes for us to purchase,” said Ashlyn Greer, CEO and founder of Fashivly, a personal styling company.
In the first year of the trend life cycle, a new style is invented — that could be by subcultures in music or art or by fashion designers experimenting with new shapes or drawing from the archives.
Model Shalom Harlow walks down the runway wearing fashion from the Marc Jacobs grunge-inspired collection for the Perry Ellis label in November 1992.
Thomas Iannaccone/WWD via Getty Images
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Model Shalom Harlow walks down the runway wearing fashion from the Marc Jacobs grunge-inspired collection for the Perry Ellis label in November 1992.
Thomas Iannaccone/WWD via Getty Images
Take grunge, for example. In 1992, fashion designer Marc Jacobs released a collection for Perry Ellis paying homage to the alternative rock movement of the Pacific Northwest.
That collection put the style’s slouchy silhouettes and plaid flannels on the fashion map, Greer said.
“And then now all of a sudden, there’s a Vogue editorial about grunge dressing,” she said. “And now all these other people in mainstream culture start to adopt that.”
Media and early adopters of a trend — like celebrities, influencers or your fashionable friend — spread the trend to the masses. At this point, retailers scramble to produce the clothes consumers want.
Then, once enough people catch on to the trend, it’s not cool anymore.
Until the trend repeats, and what’s old feels new again.
Fashion imitates life
“Novelty is both the essence of fashion and its economic engine,” said fashion historian and journalist Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell. “It’s what keeps us buying clothes even when we have more clothes than we need.”
Yet novelty isn’t enough to explain what goes in and out of style, Chrisman-Campbell said. She theorizes the trends that catch on resonate in a deeper way.
Skinny jeans are on display in San Francisco in 2015.
Kimberly White/Getty Images for Levi’s
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Kimberly White/Getty Images for Levi’s
Skinny jeans are on display in San Francisco in 2015.
Kimberly White/Getty Images for Levi’s
“I think there has to be a different emotional, or economic, or perhaps just social factor there beyond ‘it looks good’ or ‘I want to be like X person in the media,’” she said.
Jesica Wagstaff is a fashion content creator and writes A Sunday Journal, a newsletter about fashion theory. She points to the quiet luxury trend as an example of how socioeconomic conditions influence what people want to wear.
Google searches for “quiet luxury” — the trend characterized by luxurious knits and high-quality, minimalist pieces — hit a peak in the spring of 2023. This was around the time that HBO dropped the fourth season of Succession and the internet was obsessed with decoding the wealthy aesthetics of the Roy family.
“And so we started to see people have quiet luxury hauls from fast-fashion brands in order to emulate the overall style that we saw from people who were shopping at incredibly expensive stores,” Wagstaff said.
Wagstaff thinks that this trend spoke to consumers because it signaled wealth and success at a time when people were feeling the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Putting it all together
If you take all these factors into account — the life cycle of a trend, consumer psychology and the socioeconomic conditions of the day — you can begin to explain the big-pant revival.
A model wears a creation by Comme des Garçons Homme Plus during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris in 2016.
Patrick Kovarik/AFP via Getty Images
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Patrick Kovarik/AFP via Getty Images
A model wears a creation by Comme des Garçons Homme Plus during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris in 2016.
Patrick Kovarik/AFP via Getty Images
According to Fashivly’s Greer, skinny jeans hit peak popularity sometime in the 2010s, meaning the time was ripe for something new. And that’s exactly what was happening on runways. Greer points to loosening silhouettes in collections from the likes of Marc Jacobs, Comme des Garçons and others around 2016.
Then, Chrisman-Campbell theorizes, as the reign of skinny jeans came to an end, pandemic lockdowns accelerated the spread of wide pants. People stuck at home opted for comfort.
Of course, this is a tidy story, and Chrisman-Campbell points out that making sense of trends isn’t an exact science. But whether you’re watching runway shows from your laptop or don’t care about clothes much at all, it matters.
“Dress is a form of communication, and I think we neglect it at our peril because we are communicating to other people whether we mean to or not,” said Chrisman-Campbell.
And understanding that communication is essential, said Wagstaff.
“Then we can give ourselves a little bit more peace, grace and just flexibility to present ourselves in a more authentic way,” she said.
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
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Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
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I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
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