If you
see a young person strolling down the street, pants undone, it’s probably not
an “examine your zipper” situation.
Once the
provenance of your uncle after a heavy dinner or a practical adaptation to a
pregnant belly, sporting unbuttoned jeans has become a fashion statement.
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Katie Pettit, 20,
a model from
Orlando, Florida, was visiting New York this month for her first
fashion week runway booking. The gig fell through, but she still wanted to make
an impression as she walked the streets and attended parties.
She enlisted the
help of Mariela Ortega, a stylist, who helped her select a lacy black lingerie
top paired with an oversize pair of Levi’s High Loose jeans left unbuttoned and
folded down.
She was not
worried about a wardrobe malfunction.
“It looked a
little baggy and oversized but without me having to worry about a little
mishap,” Pettit said. “The zipper did fall a little bit, but my pants didn’t
fall off.”
Emma McClendon,
an assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John’s University, sees
unbuttoned jeans as a liminal style between high-waisted pants and a full
return to low-rise cuts.
“It’s something
that mirrors the general hysteria over whether low-rise jeans are coming back,”
McClendon said with a laugh. “It’s experimenting without making the plunge into
the low-rise jean.”
“General
hysteria” may be hyperbole, but the long-prophesied return of all things Y2K —
including its louche celebrity culture and super-low waistbands — has prompted
much media hand-wringing by those of us who watched Alexander McQueen’s
“bumster” jeans go from runway in-joke to cultural phenomenon in the early
2000s.
Many people
consider low-rise jeans flattering to only a small number of women with very
flat abdomens. A headline atop a
Vogue article by Molly Jong-Fast last October
pleaded, “Please Let Us Not Return to Low-Rise Jeans.”
But some women
who were born during the early 2000s low-rise heyday feel differently.
“For people who
have more rectangular bodies, it adds this extra fold to the pants that adds a
curve to the hips and makes more of an hourglass shape,” said Prisha Jain, 18,
a first-year student at New York University studying economics.
Tess McNulty, 18,
a film student also in her first year at NYU, said the style can be accessible
to a broader range of bodies.
“I think that
there’s a new wave of people saying, ‘Wear what you want, having curves looks
good, you don’t have to have a flat stomach to wear low-waisted jeans,’” she
said, using slightly more colorful language.
McNulty recently
wore her jeans unbuttoned on her way to grab free ice cream for NYU students in
Washington Square Park. She sees the style as a way to embrace a slogan she has
seen on TikTok: “You shouldn’t fit into your clothes, your clothes should fit you.”
Sophie Flores,
25, an early adopter of unbuttoned jeans, agreed.
“If you wear
anything with confidence, the people who see you will absorb your confident
energy, and I can assure you they will think, ‘Damn … they look amazing!’”
Flores wrote in an email from her home in West Hollywood, California. She also
added that Y2K nostalgia was a big part of the trend’s appeal.
“It’s been around
since 2018 with people like Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner with jeans
unbuttoned and showing thongs,” said Valerie Steele, a fashion historian who
works at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
McClendon sees a
connection to a larger historical arc.
“It reminds me
more of the original low-rise jeans, which were in the 1960s,” she said. She
compared the current taste for deconstructed waistbands — including dress
slacks she spotted at the Frankie Shop in New York — to hippies cutting off
their waistbands with scissors.
“If you think
about the Mudd Jeans and the L.e.i.s with the flowers, it was playing with this
aesthetic from the ’60s that was about breaking down and showing off the body,”
McClendon said, referring to two jeans brands that were popular during the
early aughts.
Could part of the
appeal be embracing a look that confounds older generations? McNulty doesn’t
think so. “Maybe if you’re 13,” she said with an eye roll. “That doesn’t really
apply to me.”
Still, a selfie
she shared in her family’s group chat where she was wearing her jeans
unbuttoned and rolled down did provoke a response from her parents.
“They just did the
‘exclamation point’ reaction to it,” she said.
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