On skinny jeans

a scattered musing on trend cycles

kind of hate how all my newsletters begin with a not so subtle nod to, well, Susan Sontag but the truth is i am actually very bad at titling my work and would gladly give this job to someone else. also, the formatting for this essay is going to be a little strange because my shift key is stuck and i can’t be bothered to pause long enough everytime i need to capitalise something.

so! it’s been a while since we talked about fashion. Fashion in America is something else. Trend culture is absolutely mad here. Social media will have you believe that people are changing their style every month. today i read that skinny jeans are making a comeback in 2023. this made me laugh and then I felt a little old for laughing, I always hate when people go on about how when the latest trend cycle was around the last time, it was so much better then and that this cycle is a rip off. it’s like, why are you being so grumpy? let people do what they want! but anyway I laughed and felt old because I spent my high school, BA, first job, and MA wearing skinny jeans. i literally wore them till like 2018 or 19 and still see people wearing skinny jeans every single day. when i read that little news piece on skinny jeans making a comeback, it made me realise how far this image of fashion sits from the actual everyday lives of people. it makes me think about what the fashion industry wants us to believe when we buy into trend cycles, and what purpose ideas of trend and being ‘current’ really serve.

an anecdote: the other day i stood in line outside the irs office, surrounded by other people of colour nervously waiting for their turn, documents in hand. the woman in front of me turned around, gave me a once over and asked if i spoke spanish. she wore light blue skinny jeans, a tight beige sweater. i wore an oversized sweater, my baggiest jeans, nondescript white sneakers. it took me a second to realise the look she gave me was in the direct vein of girl, wtf are you wearing? and honestly, fair opinion. in the game of fashion, we all should feel a little uncomfortable at times. don’t look at me like that, i wanted to say to her, you don’t know me, i’m a skinny jeans veteran! but truthfully in that moment i just felt embarrassed at my own adaptability. the guard checking us into the building took one look at me and spoke to me in English. So yeah, i guess the lesson here is don’t let anyone tell you that being on trend is just self care or whatever. once it gets to the cover of a magazine, an official tik tok account, the kardashian’s instagram, then fashion becomes power, plain and simple. trend and fashion culture is you (me) buying a little slice of that power for yourself (myself) and nobody else.

an entirely different context for skinny jeans: skinny jeans were what stamped me as a modern pakistani woman. many of us grew up in a moment that i would say is important, fashion wise, and that is we were the first generation of women to wear jeans. some of us did not have permission to wear jeans and we changed in bathrooms and at our friend’s houses, some of us had permission but only with kurtas or loose tops. butt coverage was also a major point of discussion. given the constraints many of us navigated on a daily basis, skinny jeans made it possible to wear jeans without looking like…the way i looked in line at the irs office. the silhouette was modern, even with a long or loose top, and if you could get away with wearing a tight one? you were on that queen shit. unlike many other types of jeans, skinny jeans also flatter a wide range of body types. even though the look is historically associated with very slim english pop and rockstars from the 60’s (beatles, dylan etc), it is the curvy brown and black women who have worn skinny jeans for the past two decades that deserve some serious recognition as major players in fashion.

Illustration by @malihaha

Fashion has only come to mean an apolitical expression of creativity because this suits the industry, the more you buy the more of an individual you are. but of course the clothes we put on our bodies are never just do do with ourselves. i’m no design expert, but the way skinny jeans flooded the market from 2005 onwards means that it is not just easy but also very cheap to make a good or passable skinny jean. if all you could find at karachi’s zainab market was skinny jeans (probably still all you can find, i just haven’t been in a few years but if someone could lmk i’d be grateful) then i am willing to bet that markets all over the global south experienced the same influx. jeans as export leftovers, pieces that couldnt be sent abroad because of minor flaws, jeans imported from china, thailand, bangladesh, second hand jeans sent to third world countries via american charity drives. these are the real ‘classic’ jeans, not a rigid pair of Levi’s, the skinny jeans that women all over the world buy for a bargain price at the Sunday bazaar. the same jeans, surely, that our dear patriarchs set the blame on whenever there is an earthquake.

in los angeles, i occupy a more ambigious class position than i do in pakistan. this means i walk a lot more and take the bus. i think of clothes differently. if it’s a cold or windy day, i have to take a jacket that might not go with my outfit, whereas someone with a car can dress like los angeles is always a pleasant 24 degrees centigrade (it is not) i see people getting in and out of their cars, in athleisure, lululemon, y2k type tops and cargo pants. i also see black and brown women waiting at the bus stop, getting on the bus, most of them in skinny jeans. old jeans that bunch at the knee, new ones still tight across the thigh, skinnies with a hoodie, skinnies with an office blouse, skinnies with a little going out top. it’s always so stark, the way trend cycles divide us. giving a few of us a secret code, turning away others at the door.

according to the fashion industry, the baggy silhouette is everything right now. it represents the future, the look of the modern woman. it is progressive to appear unconcerned with waist cinching and jeans that make your butt look round. this will hold up for a while, till the cycle moves on from the silhouette and it will. this is the bread and butter of the industry, creating a fraught relationship between clothes and bodies that can only be transformed through consumption. One show of fashion power is classic; chanel flats, birkin bag, that little black ysl dress, but the trend cycle absolutely stands shoulder to shoulder with classic style in terms of the power it wields. the fashion industry preys on our deepest vulnerabilities. it tells us if we buy into what it sells then we too will be invincible in the face of time

considering all of this, the easiest conclusion to come to is that black and brown women are obliged to wear whatever is available to them without paying attention to trend cycles. that if they were a little more ‘free’, they’d probably dress differently. but i don’t think that’s the whole picture. many people are limited by the failure of institutions to feed, house and clothe them. that doesn’t mean they don’t cook, build homes, and dress themselves. such is their resilience. people have their own codes, they build their own systems. just as there are 2010 nostalgia accounts run by white women on tiktok, archiving skinny jeans as a relic of history, there are also brown women putting on their makeup and getting into outfits that give the middle finger to those baggy silhouettes. people resist the strictures of fashion capitalism by dressing within their constraints, while also creating possibilities a trend cycle can never mimic, only chase in vain after.

it’s easy to forget that it’s people who make fashion, really, and they make it every single day. through clothes, people speak to each other in ways the industry will never fully comprehend. therein lies our power.