the moment
After two years in which the track pant was queen, jeans are back as a pillar of the luxury market. Anna Murphy assesses the wardrobe staple
INASPECIALLYCONSTRUCTEDBUBBLEBUILDING ON THE BANKS OF the Thames last October, Alexander McQueen presented its typically future-facing vision of luxury for spring/summer 2023. Amidst the spectacular gowns and sculptural suiting was a pair of bumster jeans. Nothing that remarkable to modern eyes, although the hip-revealing cutaway denim body with which those jeans were worn would certainly turn heads. Such is the ubiquity of denim in the world of luxury these days that there were nearly 1,500 iterations on the catwalks last season – incredible even by recent standards. No wonder we have lost sight of just what a strange development this is.
Jeans in their workaday origins were the antithesis of luxury. If you had suggested to a 19th-century lady who lunched that she might wear an item of clothing known only as the pseudouniform of cowboys and gold-rush miners, she would have recoiled in horror. For her 21st-century equivalent, however, jeans are a pseudo-uniform, too. Indeed, jeans have become so universal across all ages, socio-economic classes and locations that future historians may well label ours the Denim Age.
Like pretty much everyone else I know, I have a thing about denim. I have several pairs of jeans, and I wear them often, my current favourites a vastly outsize style from Raey that I wear with a neat cropped jacket or knit. I often wonder why, when I am lucky enough to have the riches of a fashion director’s wardrobe to pick from, it is so often to jeans that I turn.
I didn’t during lockdown, needless to say. Like the rest of the world, I found the allure of an elasticated waist hard to resist, not least because I also found the allure of a nightly packet of truffle crisps difficult to resist. But jeans are back in pole position for me, not to mention the rest of the fashion pack.
Why? Because in a funny way, they can feel and look quite dressy after track pants. They can certainly add structure, especially if you avoid stretch styles. The jeans devotee and stylist Angie Smith says the weight of the denim is key. ‘It’s about wearing something that is going to give you a straighter line,’ she says, ‘so if you have got a curve, add a bit of straightness to it, and if you have got straightness add a curve.’
As I write, the most expensive pair on Net-A-Porter are black and feather-trimmed from Valentino, at £1,790, with a crystal-embellished blue Mugler pair just behind at £1,780. Ladies who lunc
