Pour one out for boy band members past and present: Gen Z has come for males in skinny jeans.
TikTok, ever the hotbed of searing social discourse, has been inundated with videos in recent weeks of young men ridding their wardrobes of all paint-on-denim, opting instead to let their crotches breathe.
One creator’s clip – captioned: “POV: You finally stopped wearing skinny jeans” – has been viewed by more than 22 million people, with thousands taking to the comments to shun the thigh-constricting cut.
“All men need this transformation,” one user wrote in a comment that got more than 96,000 likes.
“Tips for guys: Please don’t wear skinny jeans,” said a second.
A third commented: “I don’t understand why skinny jeans were the thing for so long – they were so bad.”
“I hope this inspires all men,” one person commented on a different video, this one from creator Ethan Glenn.
“The greatest clothing transition. It was like a whole new world,” commended another.
“This should be a public service announcement,” agreed someone else.
Women are also taking it upon themselves to “do God’s work” and “change lives”, freeing their partner’s legs from the restraints of skin-tight denim.
Global vice president of men’s design at Levi’s, Janine Chilton-Faust, supported the notion, chalking some of the “skinny-jean slippage” up to “the TikTok generation” in an interview with Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
The fight to eradicate skinny jeans is not a new one – it’s a war that women have been waging for years, especially as the Y2K aesthetic worms its way back into the Zeitgeist.
Some men, not convinced by the sartorial decisions of Russell Brand, saw the light back in 2021.
At the time, in a GQ piece about Millennials’ wholehearted embrace of the style versus Gen Z’s dismissal of it, Teo van den Broeke pointed out: “The truth is that skinny jeans really only work when they’re worn by improbably skinny people.
“It’s perfectly understandable … why young people are feeling quite so miffed about their elders wearing such tight trousers,” he wrote.
“Skinny jeans were never designed to be worn by … muffin-topped Millennials approaching midlife, so it should come as little surprise that fresh-eyed Gen Zers, unsullied as they are by years of attempting to squeeze into leg-based sausage skins, can see them for what they are – instruments of sartorial torture, not only for their wearers, but also for those forced to look on, aghast.”
According to a [cursed] few, recent reports of the demise of men in skinny jeans have been greatly exaggerated.
“The shift out of skinny jeans has been slower than many might think,” men’s fashion director at US department store Bloomingdale’s, Justin Berkowitz, told WSJ.
“Men are really reticent to change. They found something they liked, they’re sticking with it.”
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Ms Chilton-Faust agreed, saying that no matter how much Gen Z piles on, the skinny jean has staying power. Men who wear skinny jeans, “it’s their fit, they feel good in it”.
Or, as Levi’s CEO Chip Bergh somewhat hauntingly told Insider in January, “I’ve been known to say skinny jeans will never die.”
Perhaps it’s worth remembering, then, this old adage next time you’re out, browsing for denim: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
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