This Summer's must-have denim has an unexpected twist you didn't see coming
Tue 28 Jun
By Sam Trotman
@samutaro
Jeans are recognised as a casual wardrobe hero, but this season designers are exploring creative ways to give denim a new elevated status.
DENIM. It should be the simplest garment in your wardrobe, but now more than ever designers are reimagining the sturdy fabric in new and inventive ways that Levi’s Strauss would never have dreamt of when he patented the first “blue jean” back in 1873.
You only have to look to social media to see the extreme evolution of our blue best friend. Last month, Demna sent models through the New York Stock Exchange in coordinated denim looks that doubled as Adidas tracksuits. Glenn Martens made Diesel great again with his weird and wonderful inventions that include floor-length denim trench coats shredded for a faux-fur appearance. While current IT-girl Julia Fox has been making a case for subversive sexy denim, ever since the peak of her whirlwind romance with Kanye West earlier this year.
If one thing is for certain, it's that denim is one of the most culturally significant garments of the 21st century. Invented 149 years ago, the jean has survived cultural revolutions and fashion evolutions, remaining an integral part of popular fashion in every era. It's this enduring appeal that has made denim the ultimate litmus test for style and trends, something that continues to inspire designers and style leaders today.
So what makes 2022 such a pertinent time for denim? Much of the hard stuff's success can be attributed to the ongoing wave of noughties nostalgia influencing the market. For millennials and Gen-Z, the rise of bonkers denim will always be associated with the early 00s, when pop stars like Britney Spears and Beyonce became the poster girls for low-slung, ripped jeans and the most micro of cropped tees. Social media hadn’t yet taken over our lives and teens were liberated in what was a unique era for self-discovery, especially when it came to dressing.
Let’s not get it twisted. There’s a reason why Y2K fashion, in particular denim, gets a bad rep. The image of Britney and Justin’s appearance on American Music Awards red carpet in January 2001 will forever be a reference point for gaudy denim - as will True Religion's chunky stitched jeans. But what the decade did teach us was that it was a time to have fun, which is what getting dressed should be all about right now. But don’t get too sentimental about fashion of the past—because in 2022, early-2000s style is not exactly how you originally remember it.
In the past couple of seasons, designers have flipped and twisted the era's narrative so spectacularly into a sort of standard bearer for a Y2K renaissance that not much is left of its previous incarnation. One label that has been bringing back the decades sex appeal is Ottolinger.
As Vogue recently wrote on the Berlin-based brands A/W 22 show “Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient’s collections aren’t particularly pretty. Nor are their sliced and cut out garments particularly useful. But what Bösch and Gradient do unabashedly well is challenge what prettiness or use even means in our digital age.”
Over the past three years, the label have been slowly introducing their own vision of glamour, one that is rooted in deconstructed denim featuring the skin-baring cutouts and extra straps that have become a dress code of Gen-Z. Infact, these unorthodox details have attracted a roster of A-list fans including influential faces like Dua Lipa, Kylie Jenner and Bella Hadid who wore a pair of the brand's shredded jeans in Paris.
The style of trashy-chic, uber-distressed jeans was hugely popular in the early 2000s. Look at Beyonce, who in 2001—when she was still a member of Destiny’s Child—sported a grated-down pair with a chain threaded through the holes. That same year, Christina Aguilera, the queen of the low-rise hip-hangers, performed in a frayed and patched incarnation complete with an above-the-navel matching denim baker boy hat at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards.
Fast-forward to the social media age, and the frayed look has reappeared on the runway of designers like GMBH, where off-the-shoulder denim coats and jeans were artfully distressed to reveal fluffy white wefts. Some jackets were even topped off with the type of shaggy faux fur trims that were synonymous with the era. It’s what designers Serhat Isik and Benjamin Huseby cited as a post-colonial fashion safari.
“We didn’t want to do what we normally do. We always research our own heritage and history. With this one, we wanted to explore what whiteness is, maybe because we’re tired of exploring what our brownness is. Because we’re always forced to deal with—or confront or to defend—our BIPOC identity, our brownness. And that’s not a colour we chose. And you could say it was white people who created these ideas of colour and race or otherness. We wanted to turn that othering around.”
The result is concisely brilliant: a double, and doubly appropriate, appropriation of the tropes of white feminine allure from both a queer and BIPOC perspective. One of the standout denim designs beyond the distressing, is the brand's double-fly jeans which have become somewhat of a staple in GMBH collections. Brands like Vetements’ and Y/Project have certainly explored equally BDSM-inspired denim in the past, and GMBH’s kinky zipper design speaks to the same gender fluid, club kid fashion that has become standard for younger and more open minded audiences.
Along with the rise of Y2K style, the past few years have also seen a rise in DIY fashion, a movement which exploded during the lockdown period of the pandemic and has continued to rise through platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Denim has been a canvas for creative expression since the late 60s, when hippies would transform their jeans into wearable artworks. The same creative spirit applies today with young creators looking to denim to cut, splice and stitch into new hyper-experimental shapes.
Designers are certainly feeling the same creative urge to deconstruct denim into new forms. London-based designer Martine Rose is one name who repeatedly challenges the definition of what denim can look like. For A/W 22, she served up a series of double denim looks that came creased and crumpled, appearing as though they’ve been pulled straight out the washing machine and left to hang dry wrinkles and all. It’s a purposely faulty look that she previously explored for S/S 20 when she offered up some statement jeans that featured extreme honeycomb effects that mirror the type of high contrast fades die-hard raw denim enthusiasts typically have to endure years to achieve.
Rose has also been embracing the latest wash technologies in the denim industry, including laser finishing to achieve trompe l'oeil effects like etching the silhouette of personal items like phone and keys onto the outside of jean pockets. This sustainable technology has been quickly adopted by catwalk designers in recent years as a way to reduce their environmental footprint. Laser technology replaces the water and chemical intensive process involved with traditional industrial laundry processes, instead using just electricity and light. The endless possibilities of digital technology offers brands a creative and responsible way to replace prints.
In an age where comfort is more important than ever, some designers have found ways to cleverly combine the effortlessly cool look of denim with cosy, soft materials. Balenciaga, Bottega Venetta and Bianca Saunders are a few names that have been expertly crafting pairs of summer-ready silk or leather trousers with the appearance of denim but aren’t technically jeans. Instead the pants are created using digital prints, a surrealist tactic that uses photoreal imagery to emulate the authentic character of denim.
While some toyed with optical illusion, other designers such as Andersson Bell and Ader Error have been twisting and distorting in unimaginable ways. Given South Korea’s geographic location, 11K miles from the United States, it makes sense that the country has zero regard for adhering to traditional denim design. Instead, these young labels reinterpret classic styles with skewed seam placements like asymmetric button fly or side seam that contour and twist around the leg in unexpected ways. While other pairs feature clever dart manipulations that create an abnormal geometric shape at the knee on jeans.
What these premium denim designs prove is that denim can be an aspirational product for the fashion enthusiast. While in the past denim might’ve symbolised something casual that was reserved for the weekends, today jeans have become an essential part of everyday attire - especially when it comes to post-pandemic dress codes for the office.
Given its new status in society, it is no wonder designers are subverting this ubiquitous item in new and novel ways to give it relevance for the internet generation. Whether it's a salute to the liberated style of the noughties, a shout out to Gen-Z’s custom culture, or simply a way to bring fun back into fashion, there’s no denying that denim, in all its weird forms, is back in a big way.