Skinny jeans will never die

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.

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“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.

The Jean War between millennials and Gen Z cannot be won

“You can make them classy. You can make them casual. They’re so versatile,” she said on a video call.