The Current24:04Jundies, janties, jikinis — denim is having a weird moment
There’s the “jundies” — all-too-small jean shorts which resemble lingerie more than they do outerwear.
Then came the bow-legged chic of the barrel jean, with a baggy cut that dramatically curves out at the thigh.
You can even buy stonewash jeans with what looks like a pee stain on the front from the British Italian menswear brand Jordanluca — when they come back in stock, that is.
The garments are just a few standouts among a rising trend in denim-focused outfits, many of which are trending towards the unusual.
“I absolutely love what’s happening with denim right now. Gen Z is absolutely fascinated with breaking the rules, with things that are weird and things that clash and things that don’t make sense in fashion,” Emma McClendon, author of Denim: Fashion’s Frontier and an assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John’s University in New York City, told The Current’s Matt Galloway.
According to McClendon, the trend is driven in large part by the revival of early 2000s fashion coming back into popularity among generation Z.
That decade’s top looks incorporated a lot of denim, including Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake’s all-denim red carpet look at the 2001 American Music Awards.
And while denim in some form has been consistently on-trend for decades, McClendon says the particular styles themselves tend to swing back and forth between conservative shapes and more innovative, envelope-pushing designs.
“In general, denim is just such a staple in all of our wardrobes. So any opportunity for people to kind of individualize it a little bit, I think, is very tempting,” Odessa Paloma Parker, founder of the art and style content platform Opaloma and contributing art editor at Globe Style Advisor, told Galloway.
Denim over the decades
Denim has been used in men’s and women’s workwear since the late 18th century. Credit for the ubiquitous five-pocket blue jean goes to Levi’s, however, which McClendon says created the pant in the late 1800s.
Until the early 1900s, jeans were solely worn by workers with hard labour-type jobs — until the Hollywood film industry boomed, as did its depiction of denim-clad cowboys from Westerns.
“[It was] this idea of going to dude ranches for vacationing and … this romanticizing of jeans as almost a costume you could wear in these scenarios,” said McClendon. “And that parlays its way into becoming something more casual for outdoor scenarios.”
Jeans rose slowly in popularity starting in the early 1920s, before taking over the fashion world in the ’60s and ’70s. The denim boom came at a time of intense pushback against the status quo, notably with the rise in hippie culture, the U.S. civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War. Fashion became a way for young people to express their discontent, and denim specifically became an anti-establishment symbol of the working class, according to McClendon.
“We see young people championing this fabric, wearing it in a number of different contexts to use it as a form of political expression, a tool of showing political ideology through what they’re wearing, through their bodies,” said McClendon.
This expression of counterculture eventually got picked up by the fashion industry, which McClendon says spawned all kinds of denim garments, from handbags to clogs to swimsuits.
This moment in denim history
While the “jundies” of today might not have the same anti-establishment connotations, Parker still says they’re reflective of the current political and social moment.
Parker says she’s seen more surrealism in fashion in the past few years, with pieces like the crotch-stained jeans, which she likens to the dadaism movement of the early 19th century where artists turned to absurd and abstract modes of expression in response to the First World War.
“Fashion is always a bellwether of what’s happening more broadly. We’re seeing style sort of shift … maybe it’s a bit nihilistic. People are just like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in the world, so I’m just going to express myself how I want,'” said Parker.
On the other hand, she added that attention-seekers on social media likely have a hand in breeding some of the more absurd trends, Parker adds.
“I think we’re so constantly fed marketing through influencers, through boosted posts and ads on Instagram. We’re just in a time of such unbridled and unhinged consumerism,” said Parker. “So it’s hard to even see the line between us being in on the joke with some of these styles and, you know, not being in on the joke.”
Either way, McClendon says today’s weird jeans will be laughable in a few short years once more moderate styles come back on-trend — the same way the Canadian tuxedo seemed like a faux pas in the late 2000s, a few years after Timberlake and Spears pulled it off.
“We’re in another one of these moments where head-to-toe denim is incredibly compelling. But yes, I guarantee you, five, 10 years from now we will cringe,” said McClendon.