Skinny Jeans for Men Are Long Dead. Or Are They?

Or were they? For men, at least, reports of the demise of skinny jeans have been greatly exaggerated.

“The shift out of the skinny jean has been slower than many might think,” said Justin Berkowitz, men’s fashion director at Bloomingdale’s. While attention-grabbing runway shows from brands like Gucci and Balenciaga have “been awash with wider silhouettes,” he said, slim and skinny fits still comprise roughly 70% of Bloomingdale’s men’s jean business. 

That’s not to say that skinny jeans haven’t sustained a few punches—but they’re soft jabs, not knockout wallops. Spending on men’s jeans was down by about 2% in 2022 from the year before, with declines primarily in skinny, slim and tapered fits, said Kristen Classi-Zummo, analyst at the market-research firm Circana. In their place, she said, sales of workwear-inspired denim like straight-legged carpenter pants are up. 

At Levi’s, global VP of men’s design Janine Chilton-Faust chalked some skinny-jean slippage to the TikTok generation, who are embracing Clinton-era baggy fits and preaching to their peers that slim fits are as dated as get-rich-quick NFT schemes. But the skinny jean has staying power. Men that wear “skinny jeans, it’s their fit, they feel good in it,” Ms. Chilton-Faust said.

These are men like Wade Elliott, 33, a musician in Hollywood, Md., who wouldn’t think of giving up his shrunken American Eagle jeans. They “just feel a lot more comfortable, almost a nice little hug everywhere you go.” He sees no need to chase trends, even if he looks out of date to his baggy-jeans and bucket-hat-wearing 13-year-old daughter.

An earlier rebellion drove men of Mr. Elliott’s age into skinnies to begin with. They looked at the flaccid khakis their parents wore and ran toward jeans so tight that they had to jump to even get into them. “Everything just started getting tighter and tighter and tighter,” said Mr. Elliott, who bought girls’ jeans at thrift stores as a teen to get his desired vacuum-sealed fit. Levi’s was aiming at slim-seeking men when it introduced its slender 511 and pencil-leg 510 fits in 2006 and 2010, respectively. 

The mid-aughts were the skinny jeans moment. Simpering indie and emo bands, including the Strokes and My Chemical Romance, paraded on stage in Saran-wrap-tight black jeans. High-fashion labels like Saint Laurent made the four-figured skinny jean a luxury commodity, while “edgy” (but not edgy enough to spark parental panic) mall stores like Pacsun and Hot Topic sold constricting jeans to the suburban skate-rat set. Millennial men bought into the tight trend, and often refused to let go. For proof, look to this year’s Coachella, where middle-aged members of Blink-182 took the stage in jeans that look like they dated back to their debut album, or where Jeff Bezos, 59, strode festival grounds in ripped skinny jeans and a butterfly printed shirt. 

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“Men are really reticent to change,” said Mr. Berkowitz. “They found something they liked, they’re sticking with it.” Here, a gender divide comes into focus. In recent months, Ms. Classi-Zummo observed that “almost overnight” women shed their skinny jeans in favor of Gen-Z approved baggy or looser-fit styles. But men—more stubborn and less swayed by trends—have been slower to do the same. 

That’s not to say that those 20-, 30- and 40-something skinny-jean adherents aren’t aware that the TikTok generation thinks their pants are passe. “I’m like, how did I become the old head?” said Kwame Stroman, 28, who works in entertainment programming in Philadelphia. Inspired by Lenny Kravitz and 1970s fashion, he wears skinny jeans with Cuban-heeled Chelsea boots for “a more sophisticated look.” 

As he sees it, anti-skinny-jean sentiment is an online conversation that doesn’t translate to what he perceives on the streets. Walk around his city, he said, and you’ll still see plenty of young men, “​​specifically within some subsects of the Black community,” in skinny jeans and Jordans or New Balances.

In stores, designer jeans from brands like Amiri, Fear of God and Purple—often paint-splotched and slashed like Edward Scissorhands had his way with them—have won over shoppers that used to hoard pricey sweats. “Despite this overall pullback [on denim], we continue to see higher-price denim over $100 perform well,” said Ms. Classi-Zummo. 

Of Bloomingdale’s top 20 bestselling jeans styles, five of them are skinny, all of which are from Purple, a brand whose jeans often cross the $200 mark. 

Mr. Berkowitz also noted that a strong majority of the jeans the department store sells have some sort of stretch in them. In the men’s denim market, stretch fabrics are “not something that was really being done before 10 years ago,” he said. Elasticity is an attempt to answer that eternal skinny jeans question: How are those not cutting off your circulation right now?

Stretch has been a godsend to men like Treven Warner, 25, a photographer in Canton, Ohio, who takes his jeans on the slimmer side. 

“I do like whenever they’re stretchy, because when they’re not,” he said, “it’s hard to get in the car.”

Write to Jacob Gallagher at [email protected]