Balloons, barrels and hems that pour onto the pavement. Denim has stopped hugging us and started holding us.
- By Robynne Kahn, Contributing Editor
Look down. Your jeans have been building you a bunker.
On the runways, the message was volume. Dior’s jeans showed up big and baggy, Alaïa swelled the leg into a rounded, ceramic curve, and Zimmermann and Ralph Lauren literally blew trousers up into full balloons. After a decade of jeans that clung like a second skin, fashion has finally let us exhale.
I have a theory: Soft Armour
The receipts are grim. The World Health Organization reports that one in six people worldwide is lonely. American time-use data shows daily socialising has fallen from 45 to 35 minutes in two decades, and for 15- to 24-year-olds an hour a day with friends has shrunk to 35 minutes.
In the eighties, forecaster Faith Popcorn called our urge to retreat into the safety of home “cocooning”. Here’s the plot twist: we’re not staying home. We’re carrying the cocoon outside and showing up in it. Balloon-style jeans hold a pocket of air around the leg. Barrel-shaped denim bows away from the knee instead of gripping it. A super-wide leg sweeps ahead of you and settles after you. These are the shapes of protection, a beautiful buffer between the body and a world that feels harder to be in. Denim delivered as soft armour.
Show up, take up space
Look at the street and the proportions are shouting. The denim jacket has gone XXL, with shoulders dropped wayyyyy past the bone, sleeves swallowing the knuckles and a boxy body that stops somewhere around the hip. Underneath, the jeans are super baggy and directional, pooling over kicks and flirting with the pavement.
W magazine says big, baggy jeans “aren’t going anywhere”, pointing to Dior and Ann Demeulemeester. This isn’t hiding. It’s the opposite. After years of being told to shrink to fit, taking up space is the statement. Skinny jeans were about exposure, about being seen, shaped and measured. (But do not talk to me about their return. I am not ready.)
Built, not broken
Denim was armour before it was fashion. The riveted work trousers were made for miners and labourers, in heavy cloth built to survive the job. Today’s volume goes back to that brief, but what separates it from the baggy nineties is intelligence. Volume without structure collapses. Volume that holds its shape has been engineered. Shredded thighs and blown-out knees have given way to construction, with curved seams and panelled knees. Jeans have gone from basic to finally having a backbone.
Nili Lotan and Frame have rounded the barrel leg into sculpture, and G-Star’s Arc, first cut in 2007 and back this October, shows how long this thinking has been around. Its twisted seams spiral the fabric around the leg, cut for a body in motion rather than at rest.
Mzansi doesn’t shrink
In South Africa the protective instinct is anything but abstract, and it’s hard not to see our runways through that lens. At SA Fashion Week SS26, Alison Kgomo‘s On Duty Jeans joined Black Coffee and Helon Melon in puffing silhouettes into bubbles, Robyn Agulhas‘s SinCHUI held baggy trousers in shape with architectural panelling, and Kingsley Baloyi’s Undefined Outdoor Clothing built wide proportions with padded inserts. That’s protection, literally sewn in.
The colour of retreat
Fashion has always read the room. Dior’s New Look answered wartime rationing with lavish skirts, and today the mood shows up in the dye bath. Miu Miu, Khaite and Altuzarra went to near-black indigo, the denim equivalent of drawing the curtains.
Chocolate brown, all over the SAFW runway, brings in the grounding earthy tones of soil and timber. At the other extreme, Pantone made Cloud Dancer, an off-white it calls “a whisper of calm and peace in a noisy world”, its colour of the year. Mills are revisiting plant-based indigo and tinting over blue rather than bleaching. Less abrasion, more depth.
Turn up the volume
Learn the new beat. Relaxed means ease through the seat and thigh, not slouched at the waist. Straight falls in a clean column. Wide means real width from the thigh, long enough to break over your shoes. A barrel swells at the knees and tapers at the ankles. Super baggy means exactly what it says, so size up, belt it and let it pool.
So wear the volume. Throw a huge boxy trucker or a deliciously large boiler jacket over the top and close the shell. Keep your old favourites, rips and all, because nobody’s confiscating them. The way forward is clear: show up, and take up space.
The world can press in all it likes. Your jeans have your back now.
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