What’s the Bigger Trend: Clothes or Bodies?

Whether you read fashion magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, or Cosmopolitan daily, or you simply see the headlines of articles on your Snapchat discover page, one of the trends that has been the center of attention has been the comeback of low rise jeans. Originally a trend during the late 1990s to the early 2000s, low rise jeans have a waistline that reaches below the belly button, resting on the side of each hip and showcasing the well-defined pelvic bone.

If you're around my age, being born in the early 2000s and resting on the earlier side of Generation Z, low rise jeans missed our time by a few years. Our defining years of style revolved around high-waisted mom jeans inspired by the 80s. Going from high-rise wide legged pants to a much tighter style that shows a more defined outline of your hips and stomach is an intense enough transition, and the publicity and opinions around this stark change makes it even more difficult.

In early November 2022, the New York Post published an article with the title, “Bye-bye Booty: Heroin Chic is Back.” This article centers around the change of style at New York Fashion Week, along with speculation that the Kardashian’s have reversed their Brazilian Butt Lifts (which they were never quoted to have undergone in the first place). This article describes that the “the skinnies sashaying down the runway are a drastic shift from the ‘slim thick’ and body positivity that had been in Vogue in recent years,” claiming that, not just the fashion trends, but the more curvy body type is going out of style.

One of my favorite TV characters, Carrie Bradshaw, once wisely said, “trends come and go.” She’s absolutely right in the fact that popular styles in fashion wax and wane in time, but should body types follow that same journey?

There is no issue with the idea of low rise jeans coming back in style, afterall, they are simply a retro trend and, if history has taught us anything, have been overdue to come back into popularity. The problem arises when a specific body type that society has taught us is the only one socially acceptable enough to wear this style comes back into popularity with it.

Body types are not trends.

They are not meant to wax and wane. Clothing is a material item that can be altered easily with a needle and a thread. A person’s body is not able to undergo that same change so easily. It doesn’t matter what type of figure your body seems to align with, low rise jeans are coming back, and it’s time for society to see that any type of body can wear any type of trend. Bodies are not meant to fit into clothes, afterall; it is clothes that are meant to fit bodies.

Source

Diaz, A. (2022). Bye-bye booty: Heroin chic is back. New York Post. Retrieved April 10, 2023 from https://nypost.com/2022/11/02/heroin-chic-is-back-and-curvy-bodies-big-butts-are-out/

Written by Ann Harper Covington

Copyedited by Avni Trivedi

Graphic by Lawton Harris