I was scrolling TikTok recently when I came upon a video of a popular influencer. Though her style is quite different from my own, I can appreciate her choices…usually. In this video, however, she was advising her followers on how to style skinny jeans (I can’t remember for sure, but I have a feeling it was sponsored by a denim brand). I watched as she showed three different outfits built around the silhouette and thought to myself, Every single one of these looks would’ve looked better/chicer/more modern with almost any other style of jeans. To my surprise (this is social media, after all) most of the comments agreed—many were to the effect of “girl, I normally love everything you wear, but this is not it.”
Now, I haven’t always rejected this popular-again style; I’m a millennial who, in her day, probably owned a dozen pairs of skinnies. I wore them in high school, in college and even in my early days at PureWow. (We all make mistakes.) But I have to say, not to be a bandwagon hater, even when I was wearing skinny jeans on the reg, I never really liked how they looked on my body: As someone with muscular legs—especially in high school and college, when I was playing sports pretty much every single day and my thighs were at their most powerful—the proportions of a skinny are all wrong on my legs—a tapered fit is simply not my friend. Also, most skinny jeans are made with stretch denim (necessary to achieve that almost leggings-esque fit), and I find that more rigid materials, like selvedge denim, look more grown-up and put together than ultra-stretchy ones.
I will pause here to note that there is one exception to my anti-skinny jean screed: Skinny jeans can be—and often are—the best option to wear when it comes to tucking pants into mid-calf-or-higher boots.
