Once, at a Strokes concert, I dropped my sunglasses onto the disgusting floor of the venue, and when I risked my life to drop down and get them, I looked up and realised I was surrounded by an ocean of skinny jeans-wearing legs, and I felt like a small child lost in a pine forest.
The Strokes, 2006. Photograph Credit (NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images)
The skinny jeans era of millennial culture holds a special place in my heart. You have to understand this was a reaction to the big jeans trend of our youth, when we’d rock up at the blue light disco wearing our favourite Jay Jays jeans that, dark blue denim with a fluro yellow stripe, which were always wet and raggedy at the cuffs because of their excessive size dragging them through puddles. These pants were large and heavy, and nearly killed me when I had to do that thing where you are forced by your PE teacher to jump into the pool and tread water in your clothes. It’s only natural that millennials would start seeking a pant that is sleek, slim… and even skinny in retaliation. Jeans that would make us streamlined and aerodynamic as we wander down the street, spending our house deposits on avocado toast and dreams. You could even make the argument that every time we donned a pair of skinny jeans, millennials were paying homage to the defining event of our generation, our legs representing two towers that didn’t have the misfortune of falling - but much like the fabric needed to make a good pair of skinny jeans, that’s probably a stretch.
During this era I was a tall and gangling skeleton man, custom-built to make the most of skinny jeans. When I forced my bony shins into those dramatic tubes of denim, I channelled all the raw sexual magnetism of one of those balloon men out the front of car dealerships and the glamour of a stick insect seeing itself in a mirror. Such was my commitment to the style that I began searching for even skinnier jeans, to highlight the fact that I was barely more than a pile of bones and debt. Men’s retailers could barely keep up – the flaw in General Pants’ business model illuminated by their inability to provide me with the very specific pants I craved. Instead I found myself buying women’s skinny jeans, the lack of crotch room and low rise a small price to pay for jeans so skinny that I could no longer bend over to pick up items off the floor.
Blake Lively, Gossip Girl film set, 2009. Photograph credit (Ray Tamarra/Getty Images)
Once, after meeting some hot guy at a party, we went back to his place which involved a romantic sprint through the rain, our jackets held impotently above our heads as makeshift umbrellas. However, when we got there, and went into the bedroom, I discovered that the rain had basically turned the skinny jeans into a kind of second skin, that were literally impossible to take off. Two weak-wristed twinks were powerless against the power of water and denim and their unholy marriage through science, and alas I had to return to the street, with only a deep thigh chafe to comfort me.
To this day, I have two long bald patches on my calves, shiny mirrors of skin that were created from the constant friction of my skinny jeans obsession. I can’t confirm this, but I imagine that forensic pathologists can accurately age a cadaver purely from the location of skinny jeans bald patches. ‘Aha’ they’d say sadly. ‘A leg this bald can only come from the Franz Ferdinand moshpit of 2010 – we’ve got an elder millennial here.’
Franz Ferdinand in 2024. Picture Credit (Fiona Torre/Press)
Skinny jeans will return, of course, in the cyclical nature of all fashion, like when a castaway returns from the island they were stranded on for 20 years, bewildered by all the changes in society. But these jeans will no longer be for millennials – our love affair with them will have passed, and we’ll look at the youth parading their tiny gams around and say insane things like ‘I used to have a pair of skinny jeans so tight that parademics had to cut them off me with scissors’ and the young people will laugh fondly and wheel us back into the retirement village.
Patrick Lenton is an author and culture journalist currently living in Melbourne. He will rip into all things millennial (existential dread, skinny jeans and everything in between) with Sashi Perera, Sinéad Stubbins and host Brodie Lancaster on Thursday 21 August for We’re All Just Trying Our Best at The Wheeler Centre.
Patrick will also be reading from his wickedly funny queer romcom In Spite of You on Monday 15 September for The Next Big Thing: Emerging Writers' Festival 2025 Edition at The Wheeler Centre.