The Debrief: The Decline of the Skinny Jean

06/24/22 • 17 min

2 Listeners

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.

Additional Resources:

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“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.

Additional Resources:

Join BoF Professional today with our exclusive podcast listener discount of 25% off an annual membership, follow the link here and enter the coupon code ‘debrief’ at checkout.

Want more from The Business of Fashion? Subscribe to our daily newsletter here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

A Crash Course on The BoF Sustainability Index 2022

On the heels of releasing the second, expanded edition of The BoF Sustainability Index — which assesses companies’ progress toward ambitious 2030 goals across categories such as emissions and worker’s rights — Kent and Diana Lee, director of research and analysis at BoF Insights, join Imran Amed, BoF’s founder and editor-in-chief to unpack their findings, answer questions and lay out what needs to happen next.

Key Insights:

Progress on sustainability has been slow. But, a few shifts are coming that may push fashion forward — including EU regulation aimed at the textile industry, and emergence of new models like resale and rental.
Plenty of companies have set ambitious sustainability goals. What is important now is that they move beyond target setting to real action.
Given that most brands don’t own their own factories, to make real progress, companies have to take charge of their whole value chains, not just their own supply chains.
While growing revenue and sales are often at odds with promoting less waste and consumption, there are ways to generate financial gain through reuse, especially as new technologies emerge and fashion moves to be more about community and less about peddling things.
Though it can’t wait for full transparency to act, fashion needs better data to understand where opportunities for improvement are.

Additional Resources:

For more BoF sustainability coverage, sign up now for our new Weekly Sustainability Briefing by Sarah Kent.
Widespread Inaction on Sustainability Eclipses Progress at Fashion’s Biggest Companies: Efforts to transform the fashion industry in line with global ambitions to curb climate change and establish more responsible business practices by 2030 have yet to gain sufficient momentum, The BoF Sustainability Index 2022 finds

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Next Episode

Jens Grede on Building Skims, Frame and the Future of Fashion

The multitasking entrepreneur joins BoF founder and chief executive Imran Amed to discuss the personal and professional journey that led him to co-create the category-disrupting brand Skims with Kim Kardashian.

Background:

Jens Grede has built some of the most successful direct-to-consumer brands in American fashion. Alongside his wife Emma, he launched Brady with Tom Brady, Good American with Khloe Kardashian, and, of course, Kim Kardashian’s category-disrupting Skims. This week on the BoF Podcast, the Swedish-born former ad man joins BoF founder and editor-in-chief Imran Amed to discuss his journey through the fashion industry — from realising one of his early dreams of creating an ad for Calvin Klein to to elevating Skims into a once-in-a generation brand in the vein of Lululemon or Nike’s Jordan brand.

“I've waited my whole career to be part of a moment like this, and I'm very scared of messing it up,” says Grede. “At the same time, I know that if we stop experimenting, if we stop innovating, that is the fastest way to mess it up.”

Key Insights:

Cultivating a sense of community is one of the only ways to scale a brand now, according to Grede. Great community starts with creating for yourself: products you like, want to buy and can afford.
Grede describes one of his biggest mistakes — attempting to trademark the brand name “Kimono” with Kardashian — as one of the most important moments of his career because of what he learned about community and partnership. He said the Skims team listened, owned the mistake and pivoted.
Fashion is at the cusp of a huge change in distribution due to pivots in culture, algorithms and the outsized role of social media. Grede thinks every major fashion brand that has scaled successfully was born in the cracks of a major distribution change.

Additional Resources:

Skims Plots Its Next Moves: ‘We Don’t Have the Luxury of Failing.’ Skims recently raised funding at a $3.2 billion valuation. Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede, in an exclusive interview with BoF, explain how the ‘solution wear’ empire plans to prove it’s more than a pandemic fad. First up: swimwear.
The BoF Podcast: Building Disruptive Direct-to-Consumer Brands. The entrepreneurs behind Allbirds, Hims and Hers and Good American outline the keys to their brands’ success.
Building a DTC Challenger Brand | Download the Case Study. Fashion entrepreneurs need a new playbook to launch, scale and differentiate their companies, as regulations and rising costs mean performance marketing can no longer serve the critical role it once did for DTC brands.

Join BoF Professional today using the link here.

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