The first pair provoked simple curiosity. The second, amusement at an interesting coincidence. I started to get nervous around the third pair, and by the time I had spotted five people wearing bootcut jeans on a walk from McMed to McLennan, I was thoroughly dismayed. Oh no, could they be back?
Beloved by Bella Swan and the favoured red carpet attire of a young Ashley Tisdale, the bootcut was the go-to denim style of the 2000s, and it’s somehow been the only trend of the time to resist a 2020s “Y2K” revival so far. Bootcut jeans have never really gone away, of course. They’ve been a fixture on the shelves of Mark’s and Costco over the years. But that’s different from being able to find them on the rack at H&M, which hasn’t been possible for a while now. Based on the evidence I’ve seen on campus, though, that seems soon to change.
The return of the bootcut is imminent, and it seems to be good news to many McGill students, such as Olivia Farrow, U2 Arts.
“I really like them,” Farrow said in an interview with The Tribune. “It totally depends on the outfit, but I think they’re really cool. Especially low-rise ones.”
Syeda Nishat, U3 Engineering, was more ambivalent about bootcut jeans, reserving her strong feelings for another style.
“Please let’s not bring skinny jeans back. Please,” Nishat said.
There are some who are not happy to see bootcuts returning, such as Kate Kines, U2 Nursing.
“I am not a fan, mostly just because I have short legs,” Kines said. “I feel like they look good on tall people but I have short legs for my body.”
The assessment: Opinions are mixed, though mostly positive. Those who view the bootcut comeback with pure dread are out of luck, because the style’s popularity is only going to grow.
“Hang on a minute,” you might say. “It feels like only yesterday that I arrived in Montreal for the first in-person semester since the COVID-19 pandemic to find that everyone was wearing wide-legged pants. And the mom jean revolution was just the day before, wasn’t it? What a relief it was then to finally be able to find boyfriend-fit jeans without the rips my mom didn’t like. How could we be moving on already?”
With the way that the trend cycle has been accelerating in recent years, a quick turnover rate for denim styles is only to be expected. The last time bootcuts were popular, they were hearkening back to the flared jeans of the ‘70s, thirty years before. This time, it’s only taken twenty years for them to roll around again—that’s ten years shaved off the cycle. On top of the shorter time we’re spending with each cut, we’re also looking toward an increasingly recent past for inspiration, drawing on the aughts now instead of the mom jean ‘80s or the slouchy ‘90s. We’re returning to a style that is still within living memory for the people driving the trend, which is why it might feel too soon for those who associate bootcuts with elementary school, or whose parents favour the silhouette.
But while shorter-lived fashions drive waste as people update their wardrobes more frequently, they could also have a silver lining: If we whittle down the trend cycle any further, it will start to reward the people who refuse to keep up. Because guess what denim trend came after the bootcut? That’s right—at this rate, it’ll only be a couple more years before skinny jeans are cool again. And when that happens, if you stubbornly held onto yours even when they were deemed “cheugy,” you’ll be the real winner.
