On Wide-Leg Jeans

 They Are Already Here

I started a new job, which resulted in offices in the CBD. I am once again, being chafed by a suit and this means I haven't quite figured out the logistics of riding into downtown, so I train. Walking through the CBD I am struck by the almost ubiquitous and instantaneous adoption of "wide-leg" jeans.

Part of me has been awaiting this for a long time. I am old enough to recall that australians called the "low-rise" jeans "hipsters." The look attributed to Alexander McQueen from a mid 90s show he did, but I feel more accurately should be attributed to Mariah Carey who cropped her own jeans for the film-clip for "heartbreaker" released in 1999, ready for the mousekateers of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and whoever else to usher in a brief era of muffin topping and exposed arse cracks for Y2K fashion. 

Women's jeans would go high-rise again by 2008 but remained skinny, and by then hipsters had also arrived and the general post-Bush pretentiousness of the Obama years. Obama himself was not a style icon, but next to the indie-film "Napoleon Dynamite" the tone of his administration was the biggest influence that would prevail in urban centers until pretty much yesterday.

Like, I don't like skinny jeans and even less, I don't like the lack of variation we have seen. Terrible cuts like bell-bottoms and the carpenter jeans are fine because they will be gone in a season or two. But jeans have been stagnant, at least to my ability to perceive it, for a long time. 

So now, that the contouring jeans are finally and quite abruptly gone, how do I feel? Well, mixed.

What is already and always alarming, is the speed of adoption. I feel it safe to assert that Australian fashion, even that driven by the growing Asian fashion infleunce, is not set in the southern hemisphere. Whatever process lead to the adoption of the wide-leg jean in 2025 likely happened 6 months ago in the northern hemisphere and may have been battled out over their winter such that Australia just accepts the fait accompli literally the moment the seasons officially change.

I assume "wide leg" jean is a response to a more spontaneous and quiet revolution that was the workman's or carpenters jeans. A cut that probably looks fine when sandwiched between a tool belt and steel-toed workman's boots, but I feel looked objectively terrible on everyone I saw wearing them. The most notable and pronounced aspect of the look being how they fell away from the arse and proceeded toward the ground like two PVC pipes stood upright next to eachother. 

My best speculation was that they had been appropriated by women tired of the post-J-Lo-peak-Kardashian emphasis on having a big round ass. No more jeans that looked great if you had a shelf or a dumper, but also left nothing to the imagination if your arse was flat and the cheeks migrated down the back of your legs, something men with shapeless arses also likely suffer from too, to a much lesser extent. Much like the low-rise or "hipster" jeans of the 2000s, that which was adopted by women was eventually adopted by men. 

From this, the designer labels responded with "wide-leg" for the 2024-25 winter season, and they do at least, not look terrible like the fucking workmans jeans that it should be said, managed to flatter nobody while giving no suggestion of irony, just a white flag of surrender. I'm sure they are very comfortable. Something that struck me was that seemingly every label was on top of this, as a brief perusal of Levi's, Calvin Klein, Uniqlo, Guess and Ksubi were all on top of the "trend" with products ready to sell for the trending.

This coordination is what leaves me uncomfortable, like having to pass through the walking dead of retail, regardless of whether the style is an improvement or not. The simplest explanation is that "the industry" caused the trend, supply created demand. Now I'm sure there was some attenuated process whereby the industry has consultants that were called "cool hunters" back at the turn of the century and served as protagonists for William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" book, also written up in Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point, where they go and see what cool kids somewhere organically innovate and then mass market it - like around the turn of the century how cool hunters determined "Valley girls" were appropriating the Cholo sandals and next thing you know Private school girls in rural Victoria are wearing adidas sandals despite to this day never having heard of Selina.

For me my reaction is straight up Xenophobia, the idea of buying jeans to fit-in does not compute. Yet people clearly live this way, rendering me a stranger in a strange land right at home.

How long does a laptop last? Mine is getting on 7 years old, but performance wise I suspect 4 years is a long time to hang onto a laptop. How long does a pair of jeans last me? In my case anywhere between 10 to 26 years. I don't really understand the mind that would buy a new pair of jeans every year. At most, I can understand people who wear their jeans a lot, and so are not going to get by on one pair, maybe buying a new pair every year to replace the oldest pair whose pockets are worn through by their house keys and the zipper increasingly catches or breaks and the hems are all scuffed and frayed and the crotch seem is going to break any day now.

In this sense, the stability of a more or less conventional straight leg, high crotch jean where "baggy" is what I would call regular and regular is what I would call "skinny" and "skinny" is what I would call stockings, has been great for that.

Because of the context and timing I was exposed to the not so much trend as pandemic of wide-leg jeans, my initial impression was "oh cool the 90s are back" as Calvin Klein are inaccurately marketing their cut. Very quickly my acute sensitivity though was "something is off" it wasn't quite the 90s.

Part of it, no doubt, is racism. The melbourne downtown, particularly the retail parts of it, are post-covid a Asian student ghetto. All of my experiences of Asia, is that when they appropriate and adapt western aesthetics, they never think to just ask. So we get weird and often wonderful mutations, like the Japanese putting chunks of potato on pizza which I'm sure was based on somebody misinterpreting a photo of a hawaiian pizza.

I'm impressed with my sensitivity though, because almost everyone was layered so I couldn't see any of the jeans above the thighs. The geometry was just off though that I could see it tapering out instead of scrunching. Yes, it is right not to call "wide leg" jeans "baggy jeans" because they are somewhere between baggy and bell bottoms. A facsimile of 90s jeans, I suspect seeking to address the inherent problems of low-rise or, for a purest like me - sagging.

Why now? Fixie Alpaca Lips

A quick check of another Blog almost as old as mine: Bike Snob NYC and certainly more successful than mine ever has been and ever will be, I found it unsearchable to find when his "pistadex" indicated the fixed gear bicycle bubble burst. I did find this post though that alluded to the "boom-bust" of fixed gears in the early 21st century in the past tense. So I take it as more or less confirmed that the fixed gear is dead.

In my heart I already knew it, as soon as I got back from Mexico and started riding my own again, I saw pretty much nobody riding a single-speed. Melbourne single-speed bicycle specialty shop "Just Ride It" has moved out of Fitzroy/Collingwood. I have locked my bike up to numerous hoops in Smith st in the past year, I've never returned to find a fixed gear next to it.

I don't know what has killed it, I am guessing a combination of e-bikes and Ubereats, Deliveroo, Door Dash etc. you know, basically the human face of growing wealth inequality world wide. My best guess is that this new economy of serfdom basically crowded the hipsters out of the bike lanes. And maybe, people just got sick of watching someone on an e-bike zip uphill as they destroyed their knees and ankles climbing a hill in their one inappropriate gear.

But here's the thing, I think the fixie was intimately linked to the enduring staying power of skinny jeans for over a decade. Skinny jeans and bicycles are complementary - the sales of one drives the sales of the other. 

I certainly manage to clear a top-tube in low crotch, but low crotch pants are not great for cycling. The big thing though is having the hem of your jeans chewed up by the bike chain and gear. Something that snugly cuffs your leg is desirable, and bicycles probably also drove the turned-up and rolled-up jeans trend.

With fixies gone though, and cycling something for the proles once again, I think this has allowed the space for the wide-leg, literally. E-scooters, and also EVs probably made a bunch of people finally shout Ya basta! at their winter bicycle commute to somewhere...and of course Covid killed the commute, so that certainly would have killed a lot of bicycles...

Anyway, this is all to say, that the industry has probably been itching for years to arbitrarily change "how they're wearing them" from skinny to baggy - just to increase sales, but couldn't because baggy wouldn't fly in a world where cycling was tre chic. But with people not cycling, at last, it is a dream come true. A style so different conformists have to buy it. Which would have been true of a style shift that involved turning the cuff up a bit, or a barely noticeable change in placement and number of distress tears.

Here at last is the psychological pressure to say "nobody is wearing jeans skinny anymore." Which is of course bunk. Women who look good in skinny jeans will have an attentional advantage over anyone wearing anything loose fitting. I mean, to spill the tea on the whole scam of fashion, I can testify that clothing cuts have never fooled me, I can tell who is attractive and who isn't whether you are wearing jeggings and a crop top or a moomoo and a hijab.

The main differentiation clothes maketh of the wearer is in telling me whether someone has a personality or not, first and foremost, and secondly what that personality might contain. It isn't as easy however, as just getting goth-vamp-rave gear and being "tada! interesting" because those looks to me are good indicators in the 21st century, of an absence of personality.

Anyway, let me head into more speculative territory...

Why now? Dad shoes?

A curious key weakness of a jean cut that bunches at the bottom, is that it deemphasizes shoes. The decline in popularity of fixed-gear bicycles is an objective fact. Survey the streets and their numbers are waaaaay down. The decline of the importance of footwear is a different story. Highly subjective.

Now again with my sensitivities, I noticed when I walk into Hype or Platypus franchises that sell sneakers and street shoes, that the color pallet is now in the Greige-range. Perhaps gone are the days of limited edition colour-ways, the chunky Dad-shoe NB sneaker reigns supreme, if it ever possibly can.

I basically missed this, and I feel no emptiness as a result. It's a stupid fucking fashion worn by idiots. What slapped me in the face like private boarding school genitals when I returned from Mexico to Australia, was that people were basically wearing cushions on their feet - most prominantly NB or HOKA, and I would still suggest that given our ageing population and the general disenfranchisement and disillusionment of the youth by an economy designed to transfer wealth from the young to the old to finance phase 1) lavish retirements and phase 2) expensive end-of-life care, the majority of the market are wearing dad shoes because they are dads and grandads.

That said, Asians seemed to wear designer dad shoes as some kind of rave-culture techwear, leading to a monochrome colour scheme that perhaps...perhaps paved the way to just obscure the whole thing with bell-bottomed jeans with a less severe, more graduated taper.

That speculation, being the least likely to be correct, is also to me the most interesting, because frankly so long as this cut persists - shoes don't matter. The only solution I can predict to keep consumption of both wide-leg jeans and footwear high, is a resurgance in high-tops, provided the correct way to wear the look, is to actually allow oversize clothing to bunch up at the ankle - which is how baggy jeans sit when sagging off the hips or cinched below the butt cheeks.

So let's wait and see if one trend drives another, or people save money on "statement" shoes for a little while.

Do Dunlop Volleys still exist?