These jeans bend, they contort, they, as their prevailing name suggests, twist.
If straight-leg jeans are … well, straight, twisted jeans feature legs that bend inward, like the curved limbs of a horseshoe. Envision a jeans-wearing cowboy astride a horse. Now imagine that those jeans get stuck that way permanently, their legs arching like a wishbone. Most prominently, twisted jeans have a bowed seam that veers forward to the front of the jeans, meeting your shoe laces for a little confab.
It’s a specific shape. And yet, in the jeans market, the twist is in. The Swedish mainstream minimalists at Cos sell $169 jeans with a mighty swooping seam, while Levi’s “twisted baggy wide leg” jeans offer a more modest bent, bowing forward about five or so degrees. Alaïa’s twist will cost you: That company is selling $1,400 jeans with mirror-image seams on each leg cutting across it like two italic slashes.
Lemaire, the zippy French label, has for years sold twisted denim pants with curvaceous legs and convex seams. It calls them “a Lemaire classic” on its website and often shows them on the runway. The style is equally appealing to labels more native to Instagram, like Poolhouse, an upstart New York brand selling twisted “dad jeans” that call to mind nothing so much as Popeye the Sailor Man. (Popeye may have been the original barrel-cut jean paragon.)
“It’s an instant gratification because you can look at somebody that’s wearing twisted jeans and know that they’re in twisted jeans because the seam is directly in front of you,” said Luis Osuna, the owner of Silverlake Market, a vintage shop in Los Angeles. Mr. Osuna is familiar with twisted jeans in their comparatively prehistoric form as part of the Levi’s 1990s and 2000s collections. Like Onitsuka Tiger sneakers and ringer T-shirts, bent jeans from the Levi’s RED and Engineered lines are a Y2K style affectation that is bouncing back around. He has watched those jeans sell for a couple hundred dollars. “It’s a subtle detail, but it communicates something,” Mr. Osuna said.
The twisted jeans micro-moment is a reminder that fashion trends are often fueled by the narcissism of small differences. The seam was once there, now it’s here, and for people who clock such things, that’s a radical migration.
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The post Who Would Want Their Jeans to Be Twisted? appeared first on New York Times.
