Opinion: A Millennial’s Defense of Skinny Jeans

Kate Moss once said that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” While our society has thankfully–hopefully–moved away from the unhealthy obsession with frequently unattainable waifness, there’s a slight modification that I would suggest to bring her iconic line into an acceptable 2025 utterance.

Nothing feels as good as skinny jeans make you look.

This is, apparently, an appalling concept to most of Gen Z.

Much to the chagrin of those sipping the sartorial haterade, the supposedly hideous tailoring choice seems to be making a reprise.

Skinny “pants” were an unexpected feature in many spring/summer 2025 runways in Europe. Major fashion brands like Prada, Tod’s, and Marni all sent out looks embracing the tapered trouser trend. Within the first few days of her second turn as FLOTUS, Melania Trump was seen sporting the style as she departed the White House. But perhaps the most influential advocate of the skinny jean is, ironically, Gen Z social media staple, Alix Earle, who launched a collaboration with the beloved denim brand, Frame, just last month.

So, while skinny jeans may be historically confounding to the youth, to us Millennials, the pants are intrinsic to our entire generational identity. Let me explain.

Everyone hating Millennials is nothing new. We get it. You don’t like us. You think we are lame and too idealistic. We’re corny. We “wish [we] could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy.” We waste our precious money on ridiculous extravagances like lattes and avocado toast (which is a fad that, unlike skinny jeans, seems to have slipped into the past without much notice). We have an obsession with a very specific version of pink. And you think we’ve killed every industry possible.

But skinny jeans? That’s a death we absolutely must fight.

Look, we’ve made some necessary stylistic concessions over the years. We’ve retired mustache finger tattoos. Hair poufs are no longer. A heavy streak of black liner solely applied across your bottom eyelid has been accepted as less than flattering.

We suffered through low-rise jeans that accentuated every single human being alive’s “muffin top.” We unintentionally “whale-tailed” our way through young adulthood. We experienced the inevitable dampness on the back of our too-long flared jeans as they dragged through any puddle we could find (I know, I know, Kendrick made them look cool, but just a warning).

So, please, just let us have this.

I take umbrage with my newish classification as “a person of a certain age.” Millennials are no longer the young people in the room (someone please let Boomers know this is true). That has been somewhat destabilizing as our generation fails to achieve the level of “adulting” we’re supposed to have done by this stage of life. And in order to stave off a mid-life (quarter-life? third-life?) crisis, we refuse to let go of our skinny jeans.

Maybe it makes sense that skinny jeans have become the defining clothing of our generation. Something that everyone else thinks is super lame but we will emphatically embrace until you peel them (likely with some struggle since their tightness has never made them the most comfortable or easily adorned item of clothing) from our cold, long-emotionally-dead bodies.

For my final defense of the denim that I will die protecting, I offer this: Victorians were right about this one thing – ankles are sexy. So why should we hide them?

I rest my (tapered Millennial ankle) case.