Jeans is experiencing an identity crisis in fashion; understand

What kind of jeans are in fashion today? A young, modern person might say low waisted and baggy, while their older sister claims otherwise. Ask industry experts and they will likely tell you skinny jeans, with numbers to support that opinion.

But walk into any store that sells jeans and you’ll find a variety of silhouettes and styles among the racks: mom, dad, boyfriend, girlfriend, skateboarder, chimney, 1990s, carved, cigarette, straight cut, patchwork, contrast, slim, cut. The question of what is fashion can best be formulated in the negative: what is not?

The trend cycle is said to complete its journey every 20 years, and while there’s some truth to that — low-slung jeans, for example, haven’t been popular for so long — the adage is starting to sound dated. Nowadays, new styles emerge and are recycled at a dizzying speed. So fast, in fact, that they sometimes seem not to move, like a spinning colored wheel turns into a brown smudge: everything relevant at once.

This landscape, where nothing is so “in” or “out”, but chosen or not, presents some clear victories for fashion as a form of self-expression. But what else does the range of jeans on offer say about this moment in history? After all, jeans have always been an indicator of cultural winds.

Classic jeans as we know them today—blue, stiff, with pockets—were patented by Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis in 1873. For decades they were mostly used by workers and modified to meet their needs: extra seams for reinforcement, copper rivets for prevent pockets from being ripped off, belt loops and zipper for ease of use.

It wasn’t until the 1920s and 1930s that jeans lost their strict utilitarian associations. By taking advantage of the avant-garde implicit in the clothing trade associations, Hollywood cowboys like John Wayne and Gary Cooper have lent an air of romantic rebellion to jeans. Scroll through the history of American jeans for the next hundred years and you’ll find a rough sketch of 20th century iconoclasts: bikers, hippies, rock stars, rappers and hipsters.

This century has had its share of cultural figureheads dressed in blue jean, but apart from the occasional ban by the office dress code, jeans in general have lost their subversive attachments. Everyone uses them.

E-commerce changed the game. As Lorraine Hutchinson, a commercial analyst at Bank of America, said: The ability to make new styles and test them in the market requires far less financial risk today than ever before. So why limit options?

Several fast-growing retailers seem to have done this throughout their entire business strategy: Shein, the popular Gen. Z fast fashion brand, announced that it adds about 1,000 products to its site every day—a surprising number that has attracted concern from climate and labor activists (as of Wednesday there were more than 6,000 women’s jeans on offer).

Despite elated claims about the sweatshirt outstripping “tight pants,” the world’s jeans market is only growing. According to Global Industry Analysts, it was worth more than US$60 billion (BRL 325 billion) in 2020, and there are projections that it will grow to US$20 billion (BRL 108 billion) by 2026. That leaves us where we are today: everyone the jeans models we could dream of, immediately available.

“Personal” style, as opposed to trend-based, is a popular idea today, perhaps because it suggests a kind of social progress — a movement toward a world where fashion is inclusive, accessible, and less dogmatic. This is an especially attractive proposition for consumers who feel ignored by most of the retail market.

Lauren Chan, model and advocate of the inclusion of plus-sizes, said when consumers can’t find well-crafted, stylish clothes for their bodies, “the message they get is that they’re not worthy of it.” And that’s why in 2019 she founded Henning, a clothing line in size 42 and larger.

Unlike Shein, for example, where more is more, Chan is in the business of essentializing: providing access to quality products, not access to everything. For spring, it’s launching a unique denim model: vintage-inspired, vintage-inspired stiff fabric and straight cut.

“The plus-size market is mostly made up of pieces that are semi-fashion, watered down versions of what general fashion has offered last year,” Chan said, “because plus-size fashion is often a little late to adapt to trends. “.

Plus-size shoppers have a long way to go before their access mirrors that of regular-size shoppers — no doubt evidence of widespread fat phobia. But in the long run, it might be worth asking whether having virtually endless options — and endless trends — really reflects the ideal of the average consumer.

In his 2004 book “The Paradox of Choice” [O paradoxo da opção], psychologist Barry Schwartz proposed that if freedom of choice is crucial to our well-being, having too many options makes us nervous.
“Although modern Americans have more options than any group of people ever had, and thus supposedly more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically,” he wrote.

In a recent study (now under peer review), the psychologist and his research associate, Nathan Cheek, explore a new hypothesis, which Schwartz explained over the phone: “When you give people options from large sets of options, and even sets of options of trivial choices, like what kind of drink they like, they see the choice as a statement about who they are.”

As someone who loves clothes, I don’t need this research to know that what he proposes is true for many: the countless opportunities to express ourselves aesthetically are both a blessing and a curse, capable of eliciting joy as well as awe.

Georg Simmel, who reportedly published one of the first official “theories of fashion” in 1895, believed that fashion is defined by the push and pull between the desire to accommodate and the desire to stand out. That tension is critical, he said.

“Fashion only exists to the extent that one of the two poles does not prevail in the end,” wrote the Italian psychoanalyst Sergio Benvenuto of Simmel’s theory.

Perhaps that’s why, as Anna Wintour put it, “fashion can make people very nervous.” Getting dressed is walking a tightrope where we are at one end and everyone else is at the other.

Katrina Klein has been designing jeans for nearly 20 years — for J Brand, Rag & Bone and now for her own brand, ASKK NY. She vividly remembers every microtrend she witnessed: colored, patterned, embroidered, shredded, scraped. Right now, she said, “the lack of trend is the trend.” And she doesn’t think that’s bad.

“People don’t really want to dress like everyone else,” he explains.

Individualism: It seems too obvious a place for this investigation to end. If modern technology continues to offer access to abundance while taking us to increasingly isolated corners of existence, it makes sense that fashion — famously a reflection of the spirit of the times — should follow a similar trajectory.

But the pursuit of personal style as the unique pinnacle of fashion may be taking that value too far, and the way it’s currently metabolizing itself has alarming environmental effects.

“Just because fashion and consumerism overlap doesn’t mean they’re synonymous,” said Drew Austin, a writer who covers urbanism, technology and social change, in an interview last month. “Each culture throughout history has used fashion to express itself, and doing so is perhaps even more important in cultures and subcultures where fashion is less captured by consumerism — where it best plays its role as a means of communication and enhancer of space. public.”

“Dress your way” imbues the attire of a social purpose outside the language of rank. But as an invented fashion philosophy it comes at a clear price. Unlimited choice is not a fashion utopia: neither for consumers nor for fashion workers or supply chains, nor for the planet. In other words, a thousand styles of jeans are not going to save us.

Constraints, on the other hand, can represent a creative opportunity, Schwartz said: “They are exciting in a way that simple novelty could never be.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves