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7 hours ago
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Every day, it feels as if social media finds new ways to let us know how old we are. Just joined TikTok? You’re probably a millennial. Wear your hair in a centre parting? Must be gen Z. Paid off your mortgage – or even have one? OK boomer.
This generational divide is particularly strong, it seems, when it comes to jeans. Look around you and you have probably noticed that younger people prefer to wear them low-rise, long-hemmed and ultra-baggy, while millennials wear them high on the waist and high off the ground – AKA the “mom jean”. TikTok is full of videos of young people mocking their elders for their jeans choices. Now even millennials are coming after their generation’s commitment to the style. “My fellow millennials,” begins a video from TikToker Indigo Tshai Williams-Brunton, “Just completely stop with the mom jeans.”
So how would it look if the generations swapped jeans for the day? Could a millennial cope with a pavement-dragging hemline? Could a gen Zer deal with the aching cold of a bare ankle? Could this bridge the great generational jeans divide? To paraphrase a saying: before you criticise someone, walk a mile in their jeans. MF
Morwenna Ferrier, millennial
Like many women my age, I only wear one type of jean: high waist, with a stiff carrot-shaped leg and a hem three inches above the floor. They are called barrel leg jeans and are currently John Lewis’s bestselling jean shape; neither snug nor straight, they are a halfway house for those of us with needs that are tricky to reconcile – I don’t want tight jeans but I need a bit of, well, tightness. To quote Nick Cave on his clothes, “I like to be kind of kept.”
When I get dressed, I have to think about what I can run to my son’s school in without tripping up – with a waistband that can sufficiently contain my diastasis recti (postpartum abdominal separation). Gen Z’s jeans, with their one-inch flies and pooling hems, are surely geared towards the younger, fitter and child-free.
Emma, my younger colleague, chose these jeans for me (they are by Citizens of Humanity and £320 at Selfridges; M&S does a similar style for £45) because it’s what people her age wear. But the legs are wide – 13in, slightly larger than an LP. I’m wearing shoes too, not that you would know.
More than £300 is obviously a lot of money, which is why you should always go for secondhand jeans where possible (the beauty of both trends is that you can source these styles from actual 1990s and 2000s denim). If you do go new, however, jeans are worth forking out for – not just because cheaper denim is one of the most resource-intensive (water, chemicals and energy) items of clothing but also in terms of cost per wear. What price something you can wear for ever?
The denim is incredibly comfy but even that comes at a price – they weigh 900g. Thankfully, spring has sprung. Like many millennials (and those who lived through the 70s before me), I can replay the hell of a damp wide hem like it was yesterday.
Memories of sixth form come flooding back. Our school had a loose uniform policy, but we mostly wore flares. This trend burned so hard in the early 00s that our parents were sent a letter announcing they had been banned. Did I stop wearing mine? I did not. Rather, I persuaded my mother to sew Velcro strips down the calves, creating two flaps, which meant I could turn them into “drainpipes” when I went into class.
The return of the oversized clothes of the 90s and 00s has been growing in fashion for almost a decade (longer, if you ask Cos or Armani) but, since the pandemic, they have become almost regulation. Gaping legs, drawstring waists, easy shoes. Once our thighs tasted freedom, how could we possibly go back?
I rather like a baggy style when it comes to other trousers, and still wear my loose maternity jeans at the weekend, but lately high street shops from M&S to Arket and Selfridges have deemed extra-large trousers to be less a trend and more the industry standard. “We see clear distinctions in how different age groups approach denim and the loose and baggy fits are dominating,” says Anne-Catherine Lepas, vice-president of merchandising at Levi’s Europe.
Jeans can and do define an era, though, and if you follow fashion, you will know that the ultra-baggy grunge look of the mid-90s was followed by flares, then – thanks to the Strokes’ arrival in the early 00s – skinnies, only to be replaced by the “mom”, “dad” and “boyfriend” styles (all roughly the same thing). Still, unlike most other items of clothing, almost everyone owns a pair of jeans, so they can also transcend even the most tenacious trends (Levi’s 501s are rarely out of style).
The tricky thing with this latest iteration is styling them. I lean into the looseness by wearing an oversized shirt hanging out – I’m told the French/millennial tuck (half in) is passé. I look stocky, tent-like and, well, how I used to as a teen. Maybe that is the point.
But after a few hours, I have never known comfort like it. I’m just not sure it’s very dignified to be aggressively on trend at my age. On my way back to the office after lunch, I spot a group of teen girls wearing jeans of such size that they have to physically hold them up as they walk past. They are still preferable to skinny jeans, though. Only a fool would follow that canary back into the trend mine.
Emma Loffhagen, gen Z
By the time I was coming of age in the mid-2010s, millennials were the fashion power brokers and only one silhouette mattered: skinny was king. Specifically, the supertight and ultra-high-waisted Topshop Joni jeans. Sitting down after a light meal? Forget it. It was this style, combined with the emergence of athleisure, that created the nightmarish blip in the fashion matrix that was the “jegging”: leggings designed to look like jeans. Usually paired with a ballet pump or an Ugg boot and a Paul’s Boutique bag, the jegging was the antithesis of high fashion.
Since then, TikTok’s rapid cycling of microtrends combined with gen Z’s ruthless humour has created a fraught dividing line when it comes to denim. In recent years, a spate of viral videos from gen Z creators pilloried millennials for their skinny jeans, which in turn prompted a backlash from ardent skinny-jean defenders. Then they came for millennials’ high-waisted mom jeans.
While I haven’t gone full Y2K hyper-low waist like some of my gen Z peers, I usually opt for a mid-rise and a baggier fit that I can comfortably sit down in without feeling as if I’m being sliced in half. I often buy jeans a size up and wear them with a belt. Morwenna, however, tells me that her jeans are exclusively high-waisted – and that she tends to go a size down for a more cinched look.
The pair Morwenna picked for me were a Paige high-rise barrel leg style (£280 at Selfridges; Jigsaw does a similar style for £95). They are so high-waisted, in fact, that I counted no fewer than five buttons on the crotch. They also sat far too high above the ankle for my liking – I’m not into a hem that drags along the ground, but these are so short it feels as if they were made only with an ankle boot in mind (very 2010s). I think they add about 10 years to my perceived age. Perhaps it’s a case of a bad workman blaming his tools, but I just don’t think this style looks good on anyone.
I wonder whether this generational fashion division is more a reflection of beauty standards than style. My late teenage and early adult years coincided with the nascent body positivity movement, whereas older generations might still lean towards so-called “flattering” styles that “hold it all in”.
This could also be why skinny jeans appear to be making a high fashion comeback for 2025. The silhouette has appeared on autumn/winter 2024 and spring/summer 2025 catwalks, but like many gen Z-led trends, much of the renaissance has come from the bottom up. In January, TikToker and gen Z sibyl Alix Earle, who has more than 7 million followers on the platform, launched a pair of skinny jeans in collaboration with fashion brand Frame, prompting a viral trend for social media creators to demonstrate how they’re styling them.
“Those huge, oversized silhouettes have become a bit tired in my opinion,” says gen Z fashion Instagrammer Jake Denton. “I blame the return of skinny models, Ozempic and indie sleaze.” Maybe so, but I personally won’t be dusting off the Topshop Jonis anytime soon.
Despite what social media tells us about intergenerational hostilities, when Morwenna and I exchanged denim, we were pretty receptive to each other’s styles. The waistband up to the bra line isn’t for me – but in general, we were surprised to discover that our styles aren’t as drastically different as the internet would have us believe.
So to millennials, I say: trying to play catch-up with mercurial trends is exhausting. You are better off wearing what you feel comfortable in, even if a 20-year-old TikToker doesn’t approve.
