Put Your Trousers On! (why I’m bored with skinny jeans)

It doesn’t take a genius to make the new year prediction that skinny jeans are about to disappear. Personally I’ve been waiting for them to pass on for quite some time. Without meaning to presume that I have any right to criticise all the fantastic pretty people, I’ll explain why.

There’s nothing wrong with skinny jeans per se. Let’s go back a few years, close to the beginning of the century. There’s a sartorial semantics in place, by which the shape of a trouser says a lot about the intention of the wearer. I’m talking chiefly about men’s style, if such distinctions are even relevant. Within our understood system of sartorial semantics, skinny jeans are great — the cleanness and neatness of the straight line down the leg and the implied rigidity of the close fit (meaning tidiness and effort) are a definite improvement on sloppy, baggy American jeans worn halfway down the arse. They look good on some people (mostly people under the age of twenty, I’m afraid) and terrible on others.

And then they become a uniform. They become so apparently mandatory that the sartorial semantics that made them good and meaningful in the first place is completely obliterated. Trousers can no longer “mean” anything if everyone is wearing the same ones. There’s no conversation. Which is to say that style is expressive, whereas fashion is by definition unexpressive of individuality.

OK, so a quick browse through a street fashion site like Street Peeper will tell you that, by and large, no-one finds skinny jeans interesting enough to photograph anymore, but a quick walk through a large-ish city (I’ve recently been in Toronto, London, Leeds and Manchester) will tell you that if they’re no longer on the fashion sites, they’re still on people’s legs. And good god, they’re still in the shops — both high street shops and vintage shops. The purpose of vintage shops used to be to offer more interesting and imaginative things than could be found in mainstream fashion. The majority of vintage shops that I’ve been in recently simply offer worse-condition and barely-cheaper versions of what you could find in H&M or Topshop or American Apparel. This is partly because “mainstream” and “alternative” fashions have never been closer, and partly because people are collectively losing the will to really run small businesses.

But back to skinny jeans. I’ll concede that there is, perhaps, some variety… kids can buy black ones to wear as part of a moody monochrome look, which is barely better than trad-goth. Or they can buy them in acid colours (but in 2008, who even remembers nu-rave?) to make a brash ensemble that’s boring and retro in the same way that nu-rave drugs are boring and retro. In either case the form-fitting thrill doesn’t last — if you really want to show your legs, gentlemen, wear a skirt.

So a preference for skinny jeans was inevitable, and had the happy long-term effect of smartening folk up and suggesting an alternative to baggy sloppiness. But of course hipsters (especially in North America) still found a way of incoporating them into their persistently scruffy aesthetic. And now they’re a uniform… Personally, I feel like I’ve been looking at straight, close-fitting jeans for so long that I find my eye being caught by rare deviations from that theme, and am learning to take pleasure in fabric flapping around the ankles, or the manly femininity of a blousy-billowing trouser.

Notice I’ve been sticking with the word “trouser” above “jeans”… 2008 will be the year in which Idle Tigers urge you to Put Your Trousers On!