The Debrief: The Decline of the Skinny Jean

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2022

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After years of analyst anticipation that the leg-squeezing silhouette would soon go out of style, market research firm NPD Group found sales for the skinny jeans fell behind straight leg jeans in 2021. Skinny jeans are far from dead though — still accounting for 30 percent of sales. Retailers have already felt the effects of the shift: Pacsun pulled the style from its stores because no one was buying it.

“It really just speaks to the changing of the times and how styles are evolving within fashion,” said BoF correspondent Chavie Leiber.

Key Insights:

Skinny jeans are no longer the most popular denim silhouette, according to data from NPD Group. But, that doesn’t mean no one is buying them.
As consumers come out of the pandemic, they don’t just want comfort. Shoppers are either skewing toward raw denim with no stretch or athleisure and leggings — but jegging and stretch denim styles occupying the in-between have started to fall to the wayside.
The world is in the midst of a “denim Renaissance,” says Marie Pearson, senior vice president of denim at Madewell, who added she’s never seen so many different types of fits and shapes selling.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, June 24th. This week, I'm pleased to share an episode of The Debrief, our new podcast hosted by chief correspondent Lauren Sherman. In this episode, Lauren speaks to our correspondent,avi Lieber about the decline of the skinny gene.
0:22.8	In fact, NPD group recently found that sales for skinny genes fell behind straight-leg genes for the first time in ages back in 2021.
0:32.0	But the skinny gene is far from debt and you'll learn all about it.
0:35.5	Here are Lauren Sherman and Javi Lieber on the
0:38.4	BOF podcast. Hello and welcome to the debrief from the business of fashion, where each week we
0:50.1	unpack our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondence who created them.
0:55.8	I'm Lauren Sherman. BOF correspondence, Javier, and Kathleen Chen recently reported that the reign
1:02.8	of slim, stretchy, tapered jeans, which have dominated street styles since the mid-2000s, is officially
1:10.1	over. Last year, straight-leg jeans accounted for
1:13.8	33% of U.S. women's denim sales compared to 30% for skinny jeans, knocking the form-fitting
1:21.4	style from the top spot for the first time in at least a decade, according to the market
1:26.4	research firm MPD. Today, Javi joins me to
1:30.4	dissect the decline of the skinny gene and what it says about where fashion is headed.
1:36.6	Javi, so good to have you. We've been talking about the inevitable decline of the skinny gene for
1:41.6	years, but it seems like it's finally taken place. Yeah. We were
1:47.2	pretty careful on how we called the recent data that came out. I think people are very quick to say
1:53.1	like the death of the skinny gene. And I don't think that's the case. But the skinny gene has
1:57.1	definitely been dethroned after being the best-selling denim style for like a decade.
2:03.7	Yeah. So can you talk a bit about the numbers and what has shifted?
2:08.0	Sure. So the MPD Group, which is a company that gathers spending data, they discovered a few weeks ago and put out data that the skinny gene in 2021 was
2:20.8	finally dethrone as the best-selling denim. And this past year of 2021, the street gene style
2:27.1	actually now accounts for 33% of what women were buying for denim last year. So I think it's important to note that the data,
	...

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