When someone mentions low waisted pants I immediately think of Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday: low rise cargo pants, cropped tight baby tee, and a cool girl attitude. It makes sense that low rise pants have found their place once again due to late 90s and early 2000s trends making a comeback, but to see them as widely accepted as they are today can still be a bit shocking to me sometimes.
Although low rise pants are back in, if you are going to wear them, it depends on who you are. As more celebrities are seen wearing them out in the world and younger people have adopted late 90s and early 2000s trends into their closets, low rise has come back. And from what I can tell, it’s here to stay.
Celebrities like Bella Hadid and Zoe Kravitz are no strangers to low rise pants and have been spotted embracing this early 2000s look since at least last fall. As the low rise jeans trend has kept on, I’ve noticed a new way to wear jeans low rise: unbuttoned and the waist of the jeans folded down the sides. Hadid has been spotted in this trend alongside her friend, Kendall Jenner, whose outfit photos are extremely famous on Pinterest as outfit inspiration.
When I first saw this trend on Instagram a few months back, I thought there was no way people would want to make their jeans flipped inside out at the top, exposing their lower stomachs after so many years of high waisted jeans being there for us creating a flattering look. The disappearance of the waistband has even gone beyond just a DIY trend as Revice Denim has made a pair of jeans where the waistband is essentially non-existent with a distressed look.
Personally, I feel like I’m not wearing pants if they don’t reach my belly button, so seeing not only low waisted jeans, but also jeans that are purposefully worn unbuttoned—I couldn’t believe what I was seeing (and that they could stay up like this).
For the past five years or so, high waisted jeans (or better known as mom jeans) have been the trendy style of jeans to wear. But as early 2000s trends have gotten reintroduced into the mix, and low rise jeans are on the rise (no pun intended) what has become traditionally popular is slowly changing and reverting back to what was cool twenty years ago.
As it’s been proven again and again, trends repeat themselves. But it’s hard to accept that these specific trends don’t come back with a little nostalgia included. The people who help make these trends come back to life are the influencers or celebrities who wore this style in the first place—years back as a middle schooler or high schooler. And now, as younger generations follow their lead, not only are people bringing style back in that they already have been a part of, but younger generations who never got to fully embrace it are in on it too.
Although there is a major difference with these trends coming back now, and how they were first accepted twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, these trends were seen on the skinniest of celebrities, in covers of magazines like Us Weekly glamorizing their “extreme diets” in order to pull off the trend. The second the celebrity in question had a body that wasn’t to the magazine’s beauty standards, they were quick to humiliate the celebrity, ridiculing their look while showing the world that even the most beautiful celebrities are getting negative comments about their looks. This type of body shaming on the front cover of magazines left little to no room for any sort of body positivity, creating unrealistic beauty standards being associated with pulling off these sorts of trends. With the world criticizing these beautiful women with already unrealistic body standards, how could a person reading these magazines feel confident to embrace their bodies in low rise pants?
As body positivity conversations have become more widespread in recent years as companies used more realistic body types in their advertisements and on their websites with the models they choose, slowly these trends are being embraced by more than one petite body type. Although there is still a long way to go, with platforms such as Tik Tok and Instagram, users are embracing their bodies following these trends, showing to be trendy you don’t need to have a certain body type. This trend, specifically, has given many girls the confidence to feel awesome in what they’re wearing, giving power to what they wear.
Southern California-based model, Sophie Flores (@sophielynn), says her love for early 2000s trends comes with the freedom it gives her to express herself through her outfits. “I love how y2k fashion is so in right now. I understand that it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I honestly think with confidence anyone can pull them off. I see it as a new opportunity to style baby tees and button down shirts in a new way.”
She’s no stranger to low rise jeans and definitely isn’t afraid to fold them down her hip.
As we’ve seen year after year, fashion trends give people the opportunity to express themselves through recreating different outfits and seeing what pieces can come back to life even when they’ve been stored away in a box for decades. 90s and 2000s fashion is giving new life to old clothes and gives anyone the opportunity to get experimental with different types of clothes in new and exciting ways.
As low rise pants have become embraced once again by trendy fashionistas and celebrities, it seems as though many of the pants are actual pants from the original era they were popularized in. With buying and selling clothing sites like Depop and Poshmark, there are hundreds of listings of low rise pants from the 90s and early 2000s to be bought that hold onto that nostalgic feel from these times. Instagram influencers who follow these fashion trends (and even start them back up again a lot of the time) are popularizing these looks and their influence on their followers keep these trends alive.
It’s been interesting seeing how these trends are well alive on both coasts as I talked to New York based model and Instagram influencer, Isabel Jeremias, (@izzymay16) about these fashion trends.“Low rise jeans fit in perfectly with the y2k vibe that everyone is loving right now,” Jeremias said. “And honestly just give off that hot girl energy. They are more flattering than high waisted options for people with shorter torsos and they also go hand in hand with the baby tees that are so popular right now that pair really well with low rise bottoms! I think they are just hot and make me feel like Paris Hilton.”
All I had to say to that was, “That’s hot.”