I was conditioned early to think anything wide made you look like a sitcom dad, and I\u2019d lived through the horror of early-aughts flared bottoms in the wintertime, torn and bedraggled, wet from the ground up. So when Covid let sweatpants take over and men\u2019s bottoms got baggier by the year, I held the line. <\/p>\n
Back in slacks: Skinny jeans filled the catwalk at Prada’s Milan Fashion Week show.<\/p>\n
The grey trackie, the unofficial dress code of giving up before 9am. The \u201990s dad jean, just for Jerry Seinfeld. Cargo pants, left to the lesbians. Snap pants, the property of Snoop Dogg and Sporty Spice. All of it has since been resurrected as the Gen Z uniform; clown-like styles from our youth that should have stayed in our regrets. <\/p>\n
Nothing scarred me quite like my own history. I still shudder at my 13-year-old self from 1999, wearing FUBU jeans two sizes too big, a self-assured size 34, cinched ludicrously with a belt, tartan boxer shorts showing out the back. How my mother let me leave the house like this, I\u2019ll never know. That \u201cjust out of prison\u201d look from the Y2K era left a mark, and I wasn\u2019t going back to it for anyone. <\/p>\n
My millennial friends jumped off the skinny wagon long before I did. I\u2019d been noticing it for the past two years. Every time we\u2019d meet for drinks, another 35-year-old mate would walk in with a baggier leg. At first, I saw them as age-inappropriate. You\u2019re not 21, I thought, don\u2019t dress like it. But after a couple of seasons my slim styles started making me self-conscious. Were they ageing me now? Off shopping I went, and after a day of feeling absurd in every wide-leg jean I tried on, I settled on Hallensteins\u2019 \u201cregular fit,\u201d two for $99. <\/p>\n
The last resurgence of skinny denim came with bands like The Strokes in the early mid 00s. <\/p>\n
The validation came a few weeks later. I left my apartment at the same time as my 19-year-old neighbour, and over small talk in the lobby, he told me my jeans looked good. Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes a 40-year-old man feel like he\u2019s still got it like a compliment from a teenager. <\/p>\n
Now I see we gave up on sprayed-on pants for good reason. Skinny jeans were a crime on anyone over 60kg, especially on a Kiwi rugby build. We looked like we were smuggling Christmas hams in string. Amy Winehouse might have been dead in the 2010s, but her black stovepipes remained alive and kicking, on a body type most of us never had to begin with. <\/p>\n
Which brings me back to Milan. Prada can put skinny jeans on a runway model with 4% body fat and a thigh gap you could post mail through and call it fashion. That\u2019s not a trend returning for the masses. That\u2019s a fashion house forgetting why we all left. Mark my words: we will look back at the current era of wide legs and see we were pathetically chasing a youth trend that never flattered the youth to begin with. <\/p>\n
Gen Z will find this out the hard way, same as I did. I\u2019ve recently joined the university rec centre, and I\u2019m dismayed by the volume of fat-legged jeans I see young men working out in. A millennial man would rather squat in bum-scrunch Lululemons than be caught dead in denim at the gym. Give it five years, and the same kids currently cinching belts over balloon-leg denim and calling it style will be standing in their own bathrooms, in their own bad lighting, having their own sausage-casing moment. They\u2019ll donate the lot to Recycle Boutique, declare regular-fit a revelation, and write their own smug little column about it. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be here. In my two-for-$99 from Hallensteins. Watching the whole silly cycle come back around, exactly on schedule.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was conditioned early to think anything wide made you look like a sitcom dad, and I\u2019d lived…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500664,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[192,806,59871,1863,1558,156,250046,27705,21080,201277,6142,5511,13840,250049,13457,32892,57537,250048,13631,111,139,69,6662,3111,177598,21692,221350,250047,60048,5828,1530],"class_list":["post-500663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-are","tag-as","tag-avatar","tag-back","tag-been","tag-entertainment","tag-holdout","tag-instead","tag-ive","tag-jagger","tag-jeans","tag-just","tag-like","tag-logged","tag-look","tag-mick","tag-mine","tag-myspace","tag-never","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-off","tag-out","tag-pant","tag-proud","tag-skinny","tag-slimfit","tag-threw","tag-wanted","tag-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}