The denim story: Are you having an identity crisis?

Wwhat kind of jeans hat are there now? A trendy youngster might say they are low-key and loose, while their older sibling might say otherwise. Ask an industry expert and they’ll probably tell you skinny jeans, with data backing up the point.

But set foot in any store where denim is sold, and you will find among the shelves a collection of silhouettes and styles: moms, dads, boyfriends, girlfriends, skaters, chimneys, 1990s, sculptures, cigarettes, puddles, fabrics. patchwork, contrast, thin, split. The question of what is stylish may be better formulated in a negative form: what is not?

The trend cycle is said to complete its course every 20 years, and while there’s some truth to it—low-rise jeans, for example, haven’t been in vogue all along—the saying is starting to sound old-fashioned. These days, new styles emerge and are recycled at a dizzying pace. Very quickly, in fact, at times they seem completely motionless, like colorful spinning wheels turning a fuzzy brown: all relevant at the same time.

Scenes like that, where no one is “in” or “out” as chosen or not, presents some clear victories for fashion as a form of self-expression. But what else can the smorgasbord jeans on sale today say about this moment in history? Denim, however, has always been a cultural weather vane.

Jeans for you (and you and you)

The classic jeans as we know them today — stiff, pocketed, blue — were patented by Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis in 1873. For decades, these jeans were worn primarily by workers and modified to suit their needs: extra stitching for reinforcement, copper rivets to keep the pouch from rips, belt loops and zippers for easy wearing.

It wasn’t until the 1920s and 1930s that jeans gave up their strict utilitarian associations. Borrowing so-called superiority implied by garment class associations, Hollywood cowboys like John Wayne and Gary Cooper gave denim a romanticized air of rebellion. Trace the history of American denim over the next hundred years and you’ll get rough sketches of 20th-century iconoclasts: greasers, hippies, rock stars, rappers, and hipsters.

This century has had its share of denim-clad cultural figures, but aside from the occasional ban on office dress codes, jeans have largely lost their subversive associations. Everyone wears it.

E-commerce is changing the game. As Lorraine Hutchinson, a retail analyst for Bank of America says: the ability to manufacture new styles and test them on the market requires far less financial risk today than ever before. So why limit the options?

Some fast-growing retailers seem to have made this their entire business strategy: Shein, a fast fashion brand popular with Gen Z, has advertised that it adds about 1,000 products to its website every day — a staggering number that has attracted attention from climate and labor activists. . (As of Wednesday, there are more than 6,600 models of women’s jeans available.)

Despite high-profile statements about sweatpants overtaking “hard pants”, the worldwide denim market is growing. According to Global Industry Analysts, it will be worth more than £45 billion in 2020, and is projected to add another £15 billion by 2026. That gets us where we are today: every style of jeans we could possibly dream of, is available immediately.

Is more really more?

“Personal” style, as opposed to trending, is a popular idea today, perhaps because it denotes some kind of social progress — a movement towards a world where fashion is inclusive, accessible, and less dogmatic. That is a very attractive proposition for consumers who feel neglected by most of the retail market.

Lauren Chan, a size-inclusive model and advocate, says that when consumers can’t find clothes that are well made and stylish for their bodies, “the message they receive is that they don’t deserve it”. That’s why, in 2019, she founded Henning, a clothing line for sizes 12 and up.

Unlike, say, Shein, where more, Chan is in the business of essentialization: providing access to high-quality staples, versus access to everything. (For spring, she introduced only one denim jeans design: a pair of stiff, vintage-inspired straight legs.)

“The plus-size market is mostly made up of semi-trendy pieces, watered-down versions of what fashion has generally offered over the past year,” says Chan, “because plus-size fashion is often a little too late to adapt to the trend.”

Big size shoppers have a long way to go before their access mirrors straight size shoppers—evidence, no doubt, of a widespread fat phobia. But in the long run, it might be worth asking whether having nearly limitless options — and endless trends — really reflects the average shopper’s ideals.

In his 2004 book, Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz proposes that while freedom of choice is essential to our well-being, having too many choices makes us anxious.

“Although modern Americans have more choices than any previous group of people, and thus, perhaps, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to benefit from it psychologically,” he wrote.

In a recent study (now under peer review), he and his research colleague Nathan Cheek explored a new hypothesis, which Schwartz explained over the phone: “When you give people a choice from a large, even trivial set of choices, such as what kind of drink . what they want, they treat that choice as a statement of who they really are.”

As someone who loves clothes, I don’t need his research to know that what he proposes is true for many people: the wonderful opportunity to express ourselves aesthetically is both a gift and a curse, capable of both excitement and fear.

Georg Simmel, said to have published one of the first official “fashion theories” in 1895, believed that fashion was determined by the push and pull between the desire to conform and the desire to distinguish oneself.

This tension, he said, was very important.

“Fashion exists only insofar as one of the two poles doesn’t win in the end,” Sergio Benvenuto, an Italian psychoanalyst, wrote of Simmel’s theory.

This is probably why, as Anna Wintour once said, “Fashion can make people very nervous.” Dressing means walking a tightrope with ourselves at one end and everyone else at the other.

‘Lack of trend is trend’

Katrina Klein has been designing jeans for nearly 20 years — for J Brand, Rag & Bone and now her own label, ASKK NY. He vividly remembers every micro trend he’s witnessed: colorful, patterned, embroidered, crumbled, mustache. Right now, he says, “The lack of trend is a trend.” And he didn’t think that was a bad thing.

“People don’t really want to dress the same as everyone else,” he said.

Individualism: seems like an almost too obvious place for this inquiry to land. As modern technology continues to provide access to abundance while pushing us into increasingly isolated corners of existence, it makes sense that fashion — famously a reflection of the zeitgeist — would follow the same trajectory.

But pursuing personal style as the sole pinnacle of fashion may take this ethos too far, and its current mode of metabolism has alarming environmental effects.

“Just because fashion and consumerism overlap doesn’t mean they’re the same,” Drew Austin, an author covering urbanism, technology, and social change, said in an interview last month. “Every culture throughout history has used clothing to express itself, and that’s arguably more important in cultures and subcultures where fashion is less captured by consumerism – where it performs its role as a medium of communication and an enhancer of public space.”

“Wear it your way” inspires clothing with a social purpose beyond status language. But as a whole-fabric fashion philosophy, it has a clear cost. Unlimited choice is not a fashion utopia: not for consumers, not for garment or supply chain workers, and not for the planet. A thousand styles of jeans, in other words, will not save us.

Obstacles, on the other hand, can present creative opportunities, says Schwartz: “They’re exhilarating in ways the simple novelty can never be.”

This article originally appeared on The New York Times.