Picture this: the year is 2009, and I’ve just had a tailor begrudgingly alter my skinny jeans to, somehow, be even skinnier. It was an act of hubris; a turn away from all things holy. The uncanny blue fade ended abruptly on one pair’s newly cut seam, giving my leg the effect of a flat earther’s sketch of the open sea. 

I’ve carried this memory of my ridiculous quest for the skinniest of skinny jeans with me like a curse for nearly two decades, revisiting it every time the pants pendulum swings violently back toward this slim-pinned style. There’s only so much denial of reality I can engage in before even I, a survivor of the skinny jeans era of the late 2000s, have to admit the truth: Thin is, unfortunately, very much about to be in. 

Way back in 2023, we first noticed that skinny jeans were abruptly back, along with skinny pants and leggings, as the shrunken trouser silhouette graced the Fall/Winter 2023 runways of luxury labels like Saint Laurent, Gucci, Diesel, Blumarine, and CELINE. 

But that was a brief aberration, a rumbling of the Slim Agenda to come. Now, it’s finally upon us in all its cigarette glory. The Spring/Summer 2027 shows were not a singular sign of incoming slimness but a culmination of clingy-pant culture coming to a head. 

According to recent Lyst data, demand for men’s skinny pants and jeans rose 25% month-on-month in June. That data point, paired with the 38% year-on-year rise in interest in Vans, is a clear indicator that all those indie sleaze items, along with the rise of skinny-jeaned musicians like Nettspend and 2hollis, were smoke signals before the fire. 

Consider the signal received. Prada became the talk of Milan Fashion Week with its skinniest season yet, as creative directors Raf Simons and Miuccia sent out a conveyor belt of models in hip-hugging pants as slim as the cigarettes smoked by so many Hedi boys. But what happened in Italy was just a precursor to what Paris brought to town; despite the melting heatwave that made even the breeziest clothing feel constricting, skintight fabric clinging to bodies was a dominant sight. 

Thinner cuts were prominently featured in disparate collections from Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, Dior, AURALEE, and Junya Watanabe, to name just a handful. And they were front and center at big moments like the edgy presentation of Los Angeles label 424 and at CELINE, where new overseer Michael Rider’s first standalone menswear collection debuted some of the season’s most imaginative takes on skinny pants. There, they were paired with everything from sleeveless T-shirts and peacoats chopped abruptly at the waist to, in one of my favorite looks of the season, a blue dress shirt accessorized with a garish butter-yellow tie, slouchy knit tank top, and necklace of thick wooden beads. It was immaculately ugly and more than a little Gucci, both the Alessandro Michele era and Demna’s decidedly indie-sleaze redirection. 

You could call it an industrywide aping of Hedi Slimane’s signature “look,” especially if you post on r/hedislimane or even are Slimane himself, who regularly spends his fashion weeks sharing images of his years-old looks on his IG stories in an obvious callout of runway outfits he deems imitative. (or perhaps the 57-year-old has hired a particularly cutting social-media manager.)

Truly, thinness is having a moment, full stop. Ozempic hasn’t just transformed bodies en masse; it’s also arrived in the aftermath of a Great Widening of hemlines, driven by the huge pants of Gen Z, and  comes amidst a wave of 2010s nostalgia. No matter how much PTSD I may personally have over my time in the skinny pants trenches, facts are facts: people want a cleaner, more tailored look (or, at least, want to live their indie sleaze, Y2K fantasy in the slimmest pants possible).

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