Let me take you back, for a moment, to the early 2000s. You’re on the way to meet some friends, wired headphones trailing triumphantly from your iPod mini and a pre-Recession spring in your step. Your top? Peplum.
Your necklace? Statement. Your jeans? They might well be Topshop Jamies or Jonis, and they’re definitely skinny. Your feet? Oh, wait, you can no longer feel them – your are too tight.
For millennials like me, it’s fun to revisit the bygone era of the , especially because the much-maligned style is so tied up in other irresistibly nostalgic trends, like Y2K and indie sleaze. But as for actually wearing this often uncomfortably tight and notoriously unforgiving style? That might sound like one throwback too far. Not so for , the poster girl for the style, who was photographed earlier this year in a vintage Vivienne Westwood blouse paired with jeans that were not only skinny but low-rise – a brilliantly bold, Noughties, double whammy.
Nor for Miu Miu, Balenciaga or Alexander McQueen, who all featured skinny jeans in their AW24 collections. Celebrities like and started taking the cues back in 2023, stepping out in ‘skinny-adjacent’ styles and, in the case of , tucking them into boots. But, dear reader, instead of balking at their oft-rumoured return, I’m here to offer a defence of skinny jeans, starting with a brief history of their rise and fall.
Their origin is most often traced back to Elvis and other 1950s icons, who gave slim-fitting denim its first.