JNCO Jeans Are Back & Literally Bigger Than Ever
JNCO jeans were too big to not fail. The widest denim pants ruled the late '90s but the aughts were JNCO's Cretaceous Period, as the dinosaur-sized jeans all but died off.
But because all trends are cyclical. JNCOs are back and bigger than ever. Not physically, though: They were always four-feet wide.
Gen Z has enthusiastically adopted the world's most giant jeans throughout the year, leading to JNCO becoming perhaps 2024's single most vital pant brand.
It's inextricably intertwined with TikTok, so much so that commenters crowned one young guy, his torso swallowed by a pair 50"-wide JNCO jeans, the "Final boss of TikTok fashion."
He's not alone — there's a massive contingent of young TikTokers diving into in JNCO jeans and Affliction T-shirts, looking like so many teenage Jesse Pinkmans.
And as gargantuan as JNCO jeans are, their newfound demand is even huger.
Several JNCO-inspired indie designers are producing their own denim homages, complete with embroidered back-pocket artwork. Viral musical prankster Oliver Tree sells $100 JNCO imitations. At least one enterprising counterfeiter makes flat-out JNCO dupes. As far as Eastern Europe, kids crave refrigerator-sized jeans.
Recently, I asked one of my coworkers, incidentally wearing her own JNCOs, to break down the appeal.
"I'm a big pants girl and jeans don't get any bigger than a JNCO," she said. "I'm over slim fit and over straight — I want super ultra-wide tube legs."
And, like more than a few fellow JNCO admirers, she bought her jeans straight from the source.
JNCO's retooled website offers most of its original styles at prices about as up-there as the originals. Some fans online even even point out that they're made in Mexico, same as the '90s pairs that would-be entrepreneurs attempt to flip for thousands of dollars on secondhand sites.
The product may be effectively unchanged but JNCO, the brand, is not. Today's JNCO knows exactly what it's doing: Today's JNCO jeans are a fashion proposition.
Models on JNCO's web store wear chimney-sized jeans with cool-kid tops like Aphex Twin T-shirts and Mowalola's viral "WET" tank top. On its Instagram page, they're styled with fashion-forward flair that recalls Willy Chavarria and Glenn Martens-era Diesel.
JNCO is as conscious of its place in the market as its current audience is unconscious of its elephantine jeans previous status as fashion punchline. But even if they were aware, they wouldn't care.
There's a perverse pride in wearing the stuff that made the prior generation turn up its collective nose. Gen Z intuits this in its embrace former faux pas Y2K trends that range from tiny high-tech sunglasses to low-rise everything.
But, beyond that, the appeal is utterly sincere.
Compare the JNCO resurgence against normcore, the 2010s-ish adoption of intentionally uncool fashion signifiers. Normcore was driven by irony.
However, today's youth culture wardrobes are exactly the opposite. This is post-irony. To its contemporary adherents, JNCO jeans simply look cool.
"Girls today know how to style JNCOs so they don't look cheesy," my colleague continued.
Anecdotally, while walking around downtown New York throughout the summer, I often seen upwards of a half-dozen pairs of JNCOs a day, all worn by a diverse spread of young people.
Baggy jeans, huge shorts, they're all represented and, frankly, impressively cool.
JNCO jeans' hardy quality, fire extinguisher-sized pockets and generous drape give the pants universal appeal, especially with the normalization of giant shorts and especially jorts (jean shorts).
The time is right. This is JNCO's moment. Again.
JNCO, which stands for either "Judge None, Choose One," "Journey of the Chosen Ones" or "Jeans Co." depending on who you ask, attempted several rebrands over the years, including a particularly unfortunate 2013 relaunch that leaned into skinny jeans, an oxymoron if there ever was one.
It doesn't take a marketing genius to comprehend that "JNCO" will never not equate to huge jeans.
And so, when one of the original founders rebirthed JNCO jeans in 2019, the brand wised up and widened up.
Though JNCO earned a bit of semi-incredulous buzz on its relaunch ("Remember JNCOs? They're back!"), it wasn't until 2023 that JNCO properly took off.
Last year's young JNCO adopters may have been influenced by stylistic forebears like Justin Bieber, who himself wore giant JNCO shorts over the summer.
It also helped that wider pants were simultaneously becoming less outré.
Yes, the world's most influential designers for at least partially paving JNCO's path back to relevance.
The likes of Rick Owens, Balenciaga's Demna and even former skinny jean king Hedi Slimane have all cut luxurious loose trousers that in turn aided in shifting the Overton Window of pants.
Around the same time, a boom in vintage resale prompted tastemaking secondhand stores like New York's Rogue to begin flipping JNCO jeans.
Which all leads us into the second proper golden age of JNCO, one in which JNCO is merely one of many makers of gargantuan denim trousers. The difference, however, is that JNCO was here first.
