In Defense of the Skinny Jean

The first time I encountered skinny jeans, it was by accident. I was digging through racks filled with stringy polyester halter tops in the juniors section of my local Winners when I saw them: a pair of alien-looking low-rise dark jeans with legs so tight they appeared capable of cutting off one’s circulation. Up until then, the most significant pants I had ever worn were a pair of flare jeans with glittery horses printed on them from several years earlier, which I immediately understood as juvenile and embarrassing in the presence of these edgy alternatives. A clear path to adulthood was staring me straight in the face, and I was equal parts intimidated and infatuated. Of course, I had to have them.

It was 2005. Hedi Slimane had recently presented his legendary Spring 2005 Dior menswear show in a continued effort to reintroduce the world to a silhouette once known as “peg legs.” Within months, skinny jeans were inescapable: rocker chick when paired with a leopard-print coat by Kate Moss, insouciant French ingenue when worn by Sienna Miller, who would go on to pair them with Breton-striped tops for years to come. For the next 15 years, skinny jeans reigned supreme—a consistent anchor that moored the shifting trend landscape.

Years after their peak, skinny jeans hover somewhere between the time periods characterized as “hideous” and “ridiculous” by Laver’s Law (a 1937 evaluation of fashion trends invented by James Laver, a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum). The style started falling out of favour in 2020 (or long before, depending on whom you ask) after Gen Zs on TikTok identified skinny jeans and side parts as telltale attributes of a millennial.

Five years later, there are rumblings of a skinny-jeans revival. Slimmer silhouettes featured heavily in the most recent round of menswear collections, from Prada to Tod’s; influencer Alix Earle launched a skinny jean with Frame; and Paris-based label De Pino paid tribute to the style, making it the muse of its entire Fall 2025 collection.

But can skinny jeans truly come back if, for many of us, they never went away? As of early 2021, skinny jeans were still responsible for the largest share of women’s jeans sales in the U.S., at 34 percent, according to the NPD Group. Despite slowly losing ground to their billowing wide-leg counterparts, they still abound on city streets. Walk outside and you’ll notice dozens of people still blithely traipsing around in skinny jeans, perhaps unaware that there was ever a fatwa on them in the first place.

Regardless of whether or not skinny jeans are “back” (that’s almost beside the point), what the discourse reveals is that there are now two trend cycles running in tandem at different speeds. Imagine two concentric circles. The inner circle, which rotates at breakneck speed, represents the trend cycle that the fashionably inclined and very online adhere to, whereas the wider, slower outer circle follows the natural appetites of the population. Like with a treadmill, anyone can choose which speed they’d like to run at.

“I’ve tried barrel-leg jeans, straight jeans and wide-leg jeans, but I still feel the most like myself in skinny jeans,” says Caroline Cox, 37, a writer and vintage reseller based in Atlanta. After eschewing skinnies for several years, she started to realize that baggy jeans made her feel like the subject of a popular meme involving a middle-aged Steve Buscemi in skateboard attire saying “How do you do, fellow kids?” While searching for the right outfit to wear for a holiday party last December, she decided to pull her skinny jeans out from the back of her closet and has been a stalwart skinny-jeans apologist ever since. Cox describes a sense of relief once she allowed herself to lean into the “cheuginess” of skinnies. “I know what shirts look good with them, and I know what kind of shoes to wear,” she says. Arguably, Cox’s decision to dress according to her own appetites, rather than transform her own closet on a whim, makes her inherently more stylish than those who are beholden to the constant churn of microtrends.

Mid-2024, I finally purged every single pair of skinny jeans I owned — at least six — from my overstuffed closet, including my beloved J Brands and the Meghan Markle-approved Outland Denims. When I revisited the style in the mirror, they looked inexplicably wrong, as if I was attempting to hang on to a past that no longer exists. I don’t regret my decision. I was ready to move on. That said, I can feel the steady drumbeat of other items from my youth returning: McQueen skull scarves and Isabel Marant platform sneakers. Perhaps when it comes to skinny jeans, as with anything else, a little distance can do a lot of good.