The 12 Best Skinny Jeans to Cling Onto

Out of all the options in the great wide world of pants, skinny jeans are all I wear. I grew up in the ’90s, a decade when baggy trousers were de rigueur and I was at the mercy of my mom’s credit card and, by extension, input. I wasn’t a fan of either. But by the time I hit my senior year of high school and made my own coin, the tides of fashion shifted: Skinny jeans became the thing, in large part due to designer Heidi Silimane, then at Dior Homme. I fell in love with his aesthetic—a combination of greaser, prep-school boy, and glam rocker. Raf Simmons and Ann Demeulemeester, too, imbued the same sort of vibe in the early aughts. In their collections, each presented a style of dark jeans that looked great on my body; the cling on my thighs and ankles made me feel sexy and relatively tall. For me, there was no turning back.

So, you can only imagine my distress when TikTok and Twitter were aflutter early this year, shouting that skinny is out. Words like passé, dated, and cheugy were thrown around. Baggy was back in action. I cringed. The last year and a half of daily stagnation made it hard for people to fathom wearing anything that wasn’t roomy. Comfort became paramount for getting dressed, and squeezing into tight trousers seemed illogical. Then, sweats and sweat-like stuff started springing forth in abundance. I cringed even more.

But all is not lost, my fellow skinny-jean compatriots. In the time it took cheugy, funnily enough, to become outdated, Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vacarello presented his Spring 2022 collection. It was New Romantic meets Interview With a Vampire, and it had skinny jeans galore. That same season, Burberry’s Riccardo Tisci and Alexander McQueen’s Sarah Burton also took a deep dive into dark glamour, offering tapered trousers in abundance. They weren’t jeans per se, but they showed that skinny pants are still viable.

In fact, this kind of silhouette has been around longer than most people think. From greasers in the ’50s and mods in the ’60s to cowboys in the ’70s and metalheads in the ’80s, certain groups within each decade have gravitated toward skinny fits, making it a part of their modus operandi. (I’m not sure what happened in the ’90s, but if you told me my mom had something to do with it, I wouldn’t be surprised.) Now, there are folks like me who will continue to wear skinny jeans, regardless of what social media has to say.

Do you feel the same way? Should we start a group? If so, what should we call ourselves? Before we officiate our own hive, let’s prove naysayers wrong and get our hand on some of the best skinny jeans below.