Society Faces a New Villain: Low Rise Jeans

Victim to school dress codes and overbearing mothers alike, low-rise jeans have been a fashion piece that has fallen in and out of trends for years. Popular in the 2000s for icons to flaunt their flat stomachs down the red carpet and on magazine covers, low-rise skinny jeans became somewhat of a standard, a goal to obtain for people (especially women) everywhere. They eventually made their denim exit, but as they left, I couldn’t help but feel the bitter taste they seemed to leave in my mouth.

I won’t lie and say that I am some kind of fashion expert, but I can’t help to notice the slow reemergence of low-rise jeans in Gen Z’s closet and beyond. The y2k aesthetic has come back in trickles, first with cute pink baby tees, then the velour tracksuits, and now with the dreaded jeans that push their fatphobia onto society.

For many, the time of baggy jeans and oversized tees was a time of simplicity and peace, myself included. The excuse to wear jeans that weren’t tight to my body and high waisted was the perfect combination to stay in trend and feel comfortable. While I still see this style of clothing around my city, I can’t help but notice websites and social media influencers who push the revival of the 2000s era low-rise jeans and the ideal body type of that era coming back with it.

That’s where the true evil of these jeans comes in. It’s not the cut of the jeans themselves, but rather, the idea that they promote. The very nature of low-rise jeans and the women who wore them looks at the body positivity movement and laughs in its face. As much as companies and consumers preach to love all bodies in all shapes and sizes, low-rise jeans are marketed to one demographic and one demographic only.

Even marketing for clothing companies that should want to push their product out to as many potential customers as possible seems to fall short of the expectation of inclusion. A quick search on the internet for where to buy low-rise jeans brings a couple of the main contenders like H&M, Tilly’s, and Urban Outfitters forth with their ads, but there is no diversity to be seen.

Here are just a few examples of the images one can expect when trying to find low-rise jeans:

Anyone can wear this piece of clothing if they want to, of course, but the message sent out by mass media and the fashion industry seems to think otherwise. It’s 2022, yet we are still headlines about pop culture stars who have gained weight and need to “shed off a few pounds.” The reintroduction of the low-rise jeans, especially in combination with the short baby tees, tells everyone that to pull this item off, you need to look like the models and celebrities that made it popular.

With the increased accessibility of tips and tricks through social media and the internet as a whole, the potential and very real damage that something as simple as a pair of jeans can cause cannot be overlooked. The refusal of society as a whole to allow more than one type of body to be seen wearing these jeans in a vastly public way creates an idea that there is some end result they must be working towards. Last night when I opened TikTok in hopes of mindlessly scrolling through a few videos for a few minutes between homework, I wasn’t greeted with the Taco Bell ads that usually catch me off guard, but instead with three girls’ consecutive videos on “flat stomach workouts,” “how to get an hourglass figure,” and dramatic before and after pictures. While this is a reflection of beauty standards as a whole, there is no denying that the fashion trends of the time go hand in hand with the type of content that people are searching for to find a way to fit into the industry’s mold and their newest pair of jeans.

It seems that no matter how much work was put into eradicating the desirable thin and flat-stomach-oriented mind, stereotypical beauty standards seem to push their way into the spotlight time and time again. Twenty years after the pure concentration of thin models and their low-rise jeans, we seem unable to learn our lesson about the hazards of a diet culture that is only emphasized by fashion trends. Fashion should be for everyone. This is too modern of a time to still be allowing for a few pieces of denim sewed together to dictate the ideal body shape.