Madé Lapuerta, the creator behind Data But Make It Fashion, spent the weekend running a sentiment analysis through all the mentions of “low-rise jeans” on Twitter (AKA she compiled tweets and did some maths that I don’t quite understand in order to gauge the public’s opinion on low-slung denim). She discovered that the popularity of lowriders had increased by 36 percent in the past week alone.
But the research could have been biassed: might Lapuerta also be acting as the invisible hand behind Gigi Hadid’s wardrobe? After all, the model did wear a pair of hip-huggers to dine at Giorgio Baldi (the only restaurant in LA) with Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber 24 hours prior to Lapuerta’s announcement. This is entirely skeptical—in fact, it is a joke!—but it’s a little fortuitous that Hadid chose this weekend to break from her boyfriend jeans.
Of course, these weren’t the bell-bottomed jeans beloved by Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan in the noughties. Hadid’s were still wide-legged—and perhaps slashed at the waist with a pair of scissors —and she wore them with Miu Miu loafers as opposed to the spaghetti-strapped stilettos of the noughties. Since re-entering the mainstream, these jeans continue to divide opinion, but as with all trends in the online age, that is where they will remain: frozen in amber with Uggs and Saddle bags.