This is a different kind of jeans story.
Because we’re in a different kind of jeans moment. For years, if not decades, selvedge jeans—those raw, indigo slacks that stand up almost on their own—dominated the denim discourse. Then, over the past few years, guys seemed to tire of the stiffness and break-in periods required to rock them, and moved away from denim for a while. Wider, softer dress trousers and Dickies took over, and caring intensely about denim was relegated to more of a pastime for a certain kind of craft-minded man (a great type of guy, but a specific one.)
But denim is too good of a fabric to stay down for long. As GQ’s Noah Johnson wrote recently, everyone is wearing jeans again. But the jeans they’re wearing aren’t necessarily the raw Japanese strides of the #menswear era. They’re a genre-busting new vanguard—a faux-distressed Supreme pair here, a Kiko Kostadinov X Levi’s collab there. The new crop of jeans are all the colors of the rainbow, rarely selvedge (and therefore comfy from day one) and are designed to be the shining star of your outfit, rather than the grounding anchor of it.
I also want to stress something else: I’m actually seeing people wearing these on the street. Which is to say—you can do it too. Like riding without stabilizers, or jumping off the high dive, it might feel new and scary at first. But once you’ve broken the seal, you’ll wonder what you were ever worried about.
