Denim is getting weird again

August 08, 2024

Do you remember where you were standing the day it happened, the infamous Spears-Timberlake double-denim ensemble? … No?

In case the internet has not kept the image alive for you: In January 2001, then-“it” couple Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears arrived on the red carpet of the American Music Awards wearing matching head-to-toe denim ensembles. In the years following, Spears’s floor-length, strapless patchwork denim gown and Timberlake’s all-denim suit — complete with a denim cowboy hat and a butt-pocket where a breast pocket would ordinarily be — became a punchline, a cautionary meme about how cringeworthy some of the fashions of the 2000s were in hindsight.

For millennials, the image “is, like, triggering,” laughs Emma McClendon, an assistant professor of fashion at St. John’s University in New York.

When McClendon has shown it to her undergrad students in class in the past few years, though, they’re just intrigued. “I don’t get the sense that they’re as horrified by it as we are,” McClendon says, and the comparisons they make (often including a 2022 denim-on-denim couples look worn by Kanye West and Julia Fox) are, in general, favorable.

A quick browse through Instagram or a saunter through a mall would confirm it: Mainstream fashion is firmly on the side of McClendon’s students. On the websites of popular brands such as COS and Abercrombie & Fitch, you’ll find paneled denim dresses reminiscent of Spears’s for sale. Da’Vine Joy Randolph wore a paneled Gap denim gown designed by Zac Posen to the Met Gala this month. Tory Burch and Staud, meanwhile, are each retailing Timberlake-esque denim blazers for women. Louis Vuitton’s latest menswear collection offers several full denim suits.

Denim trends tend to be a pendulum, swinging back and forth over decades from straightforward and dialed-back to experimental and decked-out. And in 2024, trends are hurtling back toward the latter extreme. Cargo jeans are in; baggy jeans are in; flared and boot-cut and barrel-cut jeans are in; so are patchwork, embroidery, bedazzlements, adornments.

Anything can be made out of jeans. Jeans can be made out of anything. (Just ask Rag & Bone, whose popular Miramar jeans are actually printed sweatpants; or Bottega Veneta, whose jean-printed leather pants retail at $7,000.)

“Fashion’s relationship with denim will always be a love-love relationship. Currently, we are in a love-love times one thousand phase,” says Somsack Sikhounmuong, the creative director of Alex Mill, who describes his brand’s mashup take on the denim dress as “a classic shift crossed with the details of a denim jacket.” He adds, “It’s an era of “seeing how far we can push it.”

More is more, at the moment, and the more unexpected the better. Thanks to a confluence of cultural forces — including renewed appreciations for the Old West and the Y2K era — we’re now well and truly into another weird, glorious, exuberant age of denim.

A decade ago, the ever-tasteful 2010s was a more conservative denim era. It saw the triumphant return of “mom jeans” and jeans styled after the original Levi’s 501. The standard, boxy denim jacket shape that Levi’s popularized in the 20th century was ubiquitous once again. Men’s and women’s jeans looked similar: Women’s stretchy, skintight, low-rise styles relaxed from the prior decade, while men’s Y2k-era baggy jeans evolved into something slimmer.

“There wasn’t this kind of ‘Frankenstein’ denim moment that’s happening now,” McClendon says. “There’s this pushing the boundaries now — denim skirts, faux-denim looks, denim-on-denim. Denim can be anything [right now], as opposed to just these heritage garments.”

Indeed, fantastical denim creations are suddenly everywhere. Taylor Swift was photographed out for dinner last fall in what looked like a classic denim jacket whimsically stretched to knee-length; a similar silhouette is available off the rack at H&M. Anne Hathaway posed in a denim bustier in a Versace ad campaign this spring; Shein retails a corset-style set of short overalls, while Stacy Bendet’s Alice + Olivia sells a denim corset too, in addition to a rhinestone-encrusted denim jacket and a funky denim trumpet skirt. Diesel, the Italian brand that got a makeover when designer Glenn Martens took over in 2020, offers an oversize men’s denim jacket adorned with a distressed overlay of red thread and a denim men’s bomber jacket. It also put hip-hugging, flared men’s jeans with exaggerated zipper pockets on its runway for spring 2024.

As McClendon points out, the 2010s’ revisiting of early denim looks contributed to the rise of “denim-head” culture, an obsession with 19th- and 20th-century American workwear and the denim garments and types that workwear popularized. This fascination has persisted into the mainstream — and now it informs denimwear in a different way.

These days, western wear is having a moment. Louis Vuitton’s January menswear show in Paris, for instance — Pharrell Williams’s third show as the label’s creative director — celebrated the American Old West. Beyoncé, meanwhile, helped further the fascination with dude-ranch style this spring with her groundbreaking country album “Cowboy Carter” and her corresponding performances and appearances. On a song titled “Levii’s Jeans,” she croons, “Boy I’ll let you be my Levi’s jeans / so you can hug that a-- all day long.”

“Both of those projects are directly speaking to the fact that they’re revising history to recoup these lost narratives, and the fact that cowboy culture has been diverse since it began,” McClendon says. Louis Vuitton’s menswear collection, indeed, infuses the Old West with elements of streetwear and stereotypically feminine glamour, resulting in garments such as a patchwork-denim suit, a denim shorts ensemble worn with Timberland boots and a jean jacket encrusted with colorful jewels in a floral pattern.

And, of course, lots of emerging fashions of the 2020s nod toward the Y2K era — and it would be virtually impossible to commemorate the turn of the millennium without re-creating its denim-adventurous ethos (see: the Timberlake-Spears ensemble, Comme des Garçons designer Junya Watanabe’s denim gowns). As McClendon points out, many Y2K-era fashions were revivals of 1970s fashions, and both eras’ uses of denim invoked the material’s 1960s-era reputation as a symbol of youth and counterculture. In all these time periods, there was a playful, why-not approach to denim like what we often see in stores and on celebrities nowadays. “Like, ‘Let’s make a swimsuit out of denim. Let’s make a bag. Let’s make clogs. Let’s have hats. Let’s have whole three-piece suits.’”

Designers and retailers have felt the change happening underfoot — and have, for the most part, felt invigorated by it. At Rag & Bone, consumers can buy a denim vest, denim slip-on sandals or even a pair of what the brand calls “tweed” jeans, consisting of rigid denim textured with laser technology to look and feel like the nubbly woven-wool fabric more often used for blazers and suits.

“We were seeking to push the boundaries of silhouettes that we would typically create in denim — expanding far beyond just five-pocket jeans,” Jennie McCormick, chief merchandising and design officer of the women’s category at Rag & Bone, told The Post in a statement. “We seek to apply the idea that upon first glance, a fabrication may seem like one thing, a.k.a. a polished tweed, but with a closer look, be something entirely different.”

Reformation — a label whose turn-of-the-millennium nostalgia leans more understated “Dawson’s Creek” than “The O.C.” — is nevertheless gamely participating in the denim renaissance. According to Alexandra Avdey, the brand’s senior director of buying, Reformation’s paneled-denim Kendi dress “was inspired by the idea of translating fashion’s current fixation with ’90s minimalism and slip dresses into denim.”

“We’re seeing a lot of appetite from consumers to experiment with silhouettes beyond jeans,” Avdey adds, “which is interesting to play with and test into as a designer.”

Despite all this, there’s still some appetite for heritage styles. Vintage Levi’s 501s, for example, particularly those from before the company transferred its manufacturing overseas, are perennially sought-after among the fashion-conscious. Valentino even put a Levi’s-like silhouette on its couture runway in 2023 (though, in a perfect encapsulation of all things denim in the 2020s, the pants were in fact silk gazar trousers dyed to look like jeans).

And, inevitably, the preference for more timeless, less funky denim looks will become mainstream once again, sometime in the not-too-distant future. Pendulums swing both ways; trends are meant to be participated in and then let go.

“There’s definitely going to be a point in the future where we move away from this, and we look back and think it’s really tacky. It happened with the ’70s. It happened with the 2000s,” McClendon says with a laugh. “As soon as we move away from it, we’re like, ‘Oh, God. That’s horrible. Why did we do that?!’”

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