Millennials are terrified of the return of low-rise jeans and Y2K fashion. But what if they looked different this time around?

Some time ago (as in, before pants made out of denim ceased to be part of our day-to-day wardrobes) I made a bet with a friend who said that she’d never wear low-rise jeans again. There were whispers going around that the most maligned item of mid-aughts clothing was starting to pop up on Bella Hadid, fashion show runways, and cool young people in places like downtown Manhattan — basically the trifecta of “things that are going to become a Thing.”

Enter: high-rise jeans, which come with their very own girdle in the form of thick, stretchy denim pressed against our stomachs, and land at or above the natural waist. The 2010s were a magical time for those of us who relish the feeling of being sucked and squeezed into our clothing, and although not always objectively comfortable , per se, they offered their own sort of comfort to people who might have previously been pants-resistant. “Low-rise pants are walking billboards for extreme thinness and androgynous frames,” wrote Rachel Syme in an ode to high-waisted pants in the New Yorker in 2019, “but high-rise styles can conform to bodies of all shapes and sizes. They not only highlight hips and butts — they demand them.”

The mainstreaming of the high waist has been a balm for many women who never wish to go back to a time when one was constantly at risk for exposing their ass crack. There are innumerable posts on Instagram and TikTok devoted to showcasing the superiority of high-waisted bottoms, which often hold in the stomach and accentuate the smallest part of the body, with side-by-side images — one with an hourglass-like figure inside a pair of high-rise leggings, another that invoked the most insidious term from the year 2003, the “muffin top.”

Cultural discourse around female bodies has always been inseparable from clothing, and when we talk about low-rise jeans, it’s obvious that we’re talking about more than pants. It’s now a popular TikTok trend to note how in the 2000s, “women’s bodies were the fashion, not the clothes” (to the extent that this is all that different today is worth questioning, but at the very least it is now considered crass to publicly ridicule a woman’s body when she dares to leave her home). Recall any red carpet image from the 1990s to the late aughts, when jeans were at their lowest and crop tops were really more like bralettes, items for which a flat stomach has often been an unspoken requirement. Those who failed to fit the ideal body type — which Simpson, along with almost every tabloid staple, did at one point or another — were punished.

We have social media and the relative democratization of cultural influence to thank for spreading the idea that perhaps it was a bad thing for women and girls to despise their bodies 99 percent of the time. Via the internet, groups of curvy and fat women could connect, share their stories, trade styling tips, and start the seedlings of what’s since become the huge swath of social media devoted to “body positivity .” It’s also social media that helped us view celebrities more like our own friends rather than out-of-touch elitists, meaning that the snarky tabloid talk scrutinizing famous womens’ bodies was no longer acceptable to fans who’d started to see them as human.

So it isn’t entirely mysterious as to why women, especially those who are now in their 20s and 30s, have long been terrified that low-rise jeans and the culture surrounding them could once again become our reality. “If you were anything above a size 2, you were fat. Millennial women learned that through their most formative years, when they were children and teenagers … they see this trend come back and it’s a trigger,” explains one TikToker in a video with more than 350,000 “Likes.”