Bye skinny jeans, hello “mom jeans”.
The world could finally enter the early stages of a new denim cycle. One in which tight-fitting pants suddenly go out of style and instead young and old shoppers flock to loosely hanging, wide-cut, flared jeans, according to the CEO of Levi’s. It harks back to a fashion trend that was particularly productive in the 1990s.
“This is not the first time this has caught on with consumers,” Chip Bergh, CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., told CNBC on Thursday about the looser denim styles. “Cycles come and go. And I think the pandemic definitely contributed to consumers looking for a more comfortable and relaxing denim.”
Bergh said Levi’s noticed a surge in sales of these new styles of jeans when it launched two different fits early last year: one that puffed out at the bottom and another that was high and loose at the waist to match.
“They definitely take off and it’s definitely a new trend,” Bergh said of jeans for both women and men.
The shift has been largely driven by younger consumers. Gen Z is everything for the so-called mom jeans. Today, the style can be found on teenagers’ favorite websites including Shein, Princess Polly, Urban Outfitters, and Revolve.
Piper Sandler’s biannual Teen Inventory Survey, released Wednesday, ranked Mom Jeans as the # 3 fashion trend among teenage girls. Baggy or saggy pants ranked second behind leggings.
A separate announcement from the UBS retail team earlier this week pointed out how fashion trends are shifting in the denim category. A global Google search analysis was recently completed which found a significant increase in Internet surfing in January 2021 compared to January 2020 for new jeans styles such as “baggy / wide jeans” and “straight jeans” while searching for “skinny jeans” became “were less robust.
“Some people have said this will create a new denim cycle and we think this could very well be true,” Bergh told CNBC. “The last real denim cycle was powered by skinny jeans. And that cycle lasted about 10 years.”
“I don’t think skinny jeans will ever go away completely,” he continued. “But right now we are clearly seeing a very strong demand for these loose fits, both on the men’s side and on the women’s side.”
On the previous Thursday, Levi’s reported a double-digit decline in sales for the first quarter of the fiscal year as store closings in Europe and lower foot traffic in the US due to the Covid pandemic weighed on results.
However, the denim maker has improved its sales and earnings outlook for the first half of the year, provided the global health crisis doesn’t get worse from here. CFO Harmit Singh said in an interview with CNBC that the company expects sales to return to pre-pandemic by the fourth quarter of 2019.
Levi’s stocks are up nearly 25% year-to-date on Thursday. The company has a market capitalization of $ 10 billion.
