Inside the polarizing return of low-rise jeans

By now, you’ve surely noticed it. Jean waistlines, sky-high not so long ago, are going lower. Low enough that you might need to think of underwear as outerwear. 

Across the fashion industry, experts agree that in 2026, ultra-low-rise will be a key business driver in the denim sector, with some brands saying that their low-rise styles have replaced the eternally popular high-rise as their best selling cut.

“What we’re going to see in this next decade is [it’ll be] really dominated by the low-rise,” says Amy Williams, CEO of Citizens of Humanity group, which also owns the premium denim brand Agolde. “Right now, you’re sort of at that early stage where people are just now getting a feel for it.” 

If you pay attention to the runways or street style, you might have already picked up on this shift, as celebrities, models, and on-trend normies started trading in high-waisted jeans for pairs that sit low on the hips in the past couple of years.

But the real tell is that low-rise jeans finally hit mass market. In 2025, global brands with slower–to-adopt consumers like Gap found their large customer base was finally ready for the navel-gazing silhouette. “We’ve been kind of waiting for this moment,” Noelle Rogers, senior vice president and general manager of Gap Specialty, told me last August. “We tested a few times on low-rise and it wasn’t until the last 9, 10 months that the customer was ready.”

Now denim designers are pushing low-rise further.

We’ll definitely see more ultra-rises coming through in 2026,” says Susie Draffan, senior denim strategist at WGSN who began tracking low-rise in 2019 when macro trends like a resurgent interest in ’90s and Y2K aesthetics put the style on her radar. Mass-market brand Lucky launched an ultra-low-rise flare style (that’s an itty-bitty, two-button, 7.25-inch rise) with Addison Rae last August, after the company first spotted her wearing the vintage version in the wild.

“Fashion is going to be pushing those extremes,” Tamara Reynolds, vice president of the Denim Center of Excellence at Catalyst, the parent company of Lucky Brand. “We are really excited about low-rise still, and we’re even more excited about super low-rise.” 

This style was bound to happen. High-rise is a silhouette “that’s really held people’s attention for almost 15 years,” says Citizens of Humanity’s Williams. “So, as with anything in fashion, that pendulum swings backward, but when it goes back, it evolves into something new.” Part of that evolution is today’s range of equally acceptable pant silhouettes: wide-leg baggy, straight, bootcut, flare, and, dare I say, increasingly skinny.

“What’s most fun about this moment is that while we’re seeing some strong micro-trends within denim—slimmer, straighter, lower-rise cuts are undoubtedly dominating the conversation—we’re still seeing brands across the market sell nearly every kind of denim shape and style,” says Alexandra Avdey, vice president of merchandising at Reformation. “In the past, there has almost always been a single must-have style. Right now, there’s something for everyone.” 

So pick your poison. The result is sure to be toxic (1. adj., pejorative, a negative association due to the ultra-low-rise’s inherent ties to an era that correlated beauty with thinness; or 2., adj., complimentary, origin: Britney Spears song; a nostalgic association with naughties cultural icons that brings new and interesting approaches to dress in the current context.)

Ultra-low-rise is polarizing. But whether or not you want to hang, it’s going to be here for a while.

Slow burn, hot stats

Data from a cross-section of denim brands is indicating that low-rise is a big business driver. At Citizens of Humanity, its low-slung baggy represents 35% of its business. Four of its top 10 styles are low-rise, according to the company. Agolde since introduced a low-rise bootcut for Spring, which the website describes as “a true nod to the early 2000s.” Though the company doesn’t plan to release any ultra-low-rise styles, this bootcut is now the company’s lowest rise (8 inches) and sits low on the hips. 

The numbers are even more striking at Reformation. Sales of low-rise denim grew 500% in 2025 compared to 2024. Like Citizens, 4 of Ref’s top 10 jeans SKUs year to date are low-rise. Its top-selling denim style is its Cary low-rise slouchy wide-leg jean, which overtook its high-rise counterpart. (Hitting about an inch below the navel, Cary feels a bit more like a mid-rise.) 

And the style isn’t just for the youngest consumers. The company says that low-rise is performing across generations, with 38% of low-rise e-comm sales driven by Gen Z and 30% by millennials. If anything, going low has more to do with a willingness to experiment rather than age. 

At Lucky, whose customers are predominantly women in their twenties, low-rise sales increased 763% in August 2025 compared to the previous year, and contributed 43% to full price denim sales, compared to 8% the previous year. Gap didn’t share specific data, but following a test period that resulted in high sales volumes, the company went all in on low-rise with its long and lean launch with girl group Katseye last August.

“We’ve seen a huge uptrend that is more U.S. and North American-based starting in basically like August of this year,” Citizens CEO Williams told me in late 2025, noting the upswing is all coming from either low-rise or straight leg shapes.

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Of course, runways are one of the best signals for what brands will launch down the road, and waistlines are jostling for share. Over the last two seasons, designer labels like Diesel (see its nearly-bumster styles) and Alexander McQueen (revival of its actual ’90s bumster styles) have shown off ultra-low-rise styles. Low and natural or high-rise styles held equal share of the denim mix at the A/W 25/26 shows, at 17.8%, with low-rise styles increasing 11.8 percentage points year over year, according to WGSN catwalks data provided to Fast Company.

Cultural emergence

Last fall I was scrolling through Instagram and a paparazzi photo of actress Zoë Kravitz—my personal style chimera—in baggy low-rise jeans crossed my feed. Kravitz, 37, wore them low on the hip, without a waistband or pockets so they’re flat across the pelvis. They also had an adjustable toggle closure at the ankle. The design felt new. After some recon I learned it was the $325 Still Here’s Sport jean that fashion acolytes have been ravenously scooping up.

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Head of Brand Eliza Rolfs told me when I visited the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, store that the connection happened organically, after Kravitz’s stylist, Danielle Goldberg, reached out and pulled some styles. Kravitz kept three pairs of the Sport, which Rolfs describes as a more classic approach to low-rise. She’s not the only fan: The brand’s Pear wash sold out in 25 minutes after its first release, which led to 10,000 people joining a waitlist. The original Sport Jean, which launched in July 2025, sold out four times within its first six months on the market.

As with previous trends, many denim designers I spoke with cited street and celebrity style as their early ultra-low-rise indicators, and name-checked Bella and Gigi Hadid as two examples. The members of Katseye are always in hip-bone, thong-strap, or belly-chain-bearing pants. (Thong straps, functionally designed to hide a visible panty line, have now become lucrative new real estate for charms and bedazzling.)

So are other Gen Z pop stars like Tate McCray, Addison Rae, or more recently, fellow millennial Charli XCX, 33, who wore a thong-bearing jean to promo her new movie, The Moment. In the beginning of February, stylist Andrew Mukamal dressed Margo Robbie, 35, in super-low leather pants for a look during her Wuthering Heights press tour. 

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That’s because many current cultural icons are looking to the irreverence and confidence of early 2000s stars like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, according to Reynolds. “Really low-rise denim was a key piece in the outfitting and the entire look. That’s how the Y2K kind of revival came across and it caught like wildfire,” she says. Reformation plans to lean even more into Y2K this year, with components like exposed buttons, rivets, seaming details and low-rise boot-cut styles, for instance.  

“Nostalgia is a big driver,” says Draffan. Interest in that period revived a range of low-rise styles, with ’90s-inspired baggy and straight legs as well as bootcut styles from the noughties “driving the revival,” she adds.

But don’t just peg ultra-low-rise’s comeback to a long-simmering cultural fixation on Xtina at the 2001 VMAs. The low-rise revival has a co-dependency with other shifting denim trends like baggy pants. “As those baggier fits got lower and lower slung, and they’re belted and they’re hanging off the hips, it gave rise to the midriff, right?” asks Reynolds. “So that’s where I feel like the rumblings from a design point of view first came.” 

Can design fixes mend cultural flaws?

Like anything you wear, denim has direct ties to material and tech innovations as well as the broader sociocultural climate. “Back in the day when skinny jeans became a thing, it was primarily because stretch products had evolved to a point where there was so much stretch in the product that you could wear a skin tight jean all day long and be really comfortable,” says Williams.  

Stretch materials remained as waistlines shifted to high-rise in the early to mid-2010s (I was a Citizens of Humanity Rocket devotee), and it made for a skin-tight fit like leggings, which people also couldn’t wait to peel off and replace with sweats or actual Lululemon leggings when they got home. 

When the pandemic hit, so did the wide-legged pants. “It’s super comfortable and you can wear it all day long,” says Williams. “I think that’s what got people out of their sweatpants from COVID and into wide leg jeans.” The most common rise was still around 9 inches (considered high-rise), though. 

Williams says high-rise jeans have been telling the same fashion story for a long time, and consumers are simply ready for styling that has something fresh to say. “You can tell when you lose your attention span and the customer changes gears,” she says. “I do think there’s just an element that is absolutely cyclical.”

When I delivered the news to friends that ultra-low-rise is back, the reaction wasn’t very different from what it’d be like to share that you got back together with a boyfriend they all secretly hated: healthy skepticism. “You have to be hot to wear low-rise,” an aggravated friend told me at a party (in this context: hot = 2000s model thin). 

Cynicism from those of us who’ve been through the first go-around is fair, because the ultra-low-rise revival calls back to the era we came of age in: dominated by fatphobia and capped by Kate Moss telling WWD one of her mottos is “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” 

And while contemporary low-rise is in reality more of a wearable mid-rise (Reformation, for instance, dropped the crotch so the wearer could adjust where it sits by sizing up or down), ultra-low-rise, which sits low on the hip bone and creates a more square rather than hourglass shape, is less universally flattering. 

“While they’re trending right now with Gen Z, there is obviously a huge swath of the market for whom a low-rise will just not appeal,” says Draffan, the WGSN strategist. “It’s a tricky rise to pull off, not to mention that anyone over 30 already did the low-rise at some point in their lives, and isn’t keen to go back there, especially Millennials and the mature market.” She describes mid and high-rises as more flattering with “broader consumer appeal.”

The good news for the low-rise-averse is that wearable high and mid rises are still in the mix, so those with an aversion to navel exposure can keep a safe distance in the comfortable rise of their choice. 

“For low-rise, the cool thing about denim trends is when a silhouette does come back in style is that it lingers a little bit, rather than fast fashion, [which is] a voracious trend cycle,” says Rolfs of Still Here Sport. “Denim tends to stick for a couple of years and that has ripple effects in the rest of the garments as well.” 

The leg opening of denim is tapering toward straight, which in turn looks nice with a pair of loafers, which are becoming more popular too, thanks to a prep revival. “The customer’s purchasing a lot more than they have,” says Williams, who calls straight legs and loafers the new wide leg and Sambas. And it’ll keep evolving: a stovepipe skinny jean is one of WGSN’s key fashion items for 2026.

Anatomy of the new low-rise

Denim designers I spoke with insist the style is more inclusive this time around, and brands like Gap are showing the style on a variety of body types. The fit of Y2K-era low-rise jeans were a painted-on, tightly fitting second skin.

“When it comes to today’s aesthetics, it feels much more sophisticated and cool to wear something that sits a little bit away from the body,” says Williams. “So you’ll see a low-rise iterated, in a way, that has like a bit of ease, maybe bagginess to it so it still looks refined and it has a little bit more of what you would imagine today’s model off duty to have evolved to.”

Williams says the new cuts are easier to wear and have more balance proportions, allowing for a different visual anchor. “Now you’re anchoring the jean at that low hip, so the top part is the anchor rather than the legs and the booty as the anchor,” she says. “That solves the whole host of problems that we’ve all witnessed.”

Designers make lots of micro adjustments to make a low-rise jean look more flattering and proportional. “You’re going from a proportion that’s hourglass-shaped to one that sits low and is a little bit more square, and you’re shrinking down all of the proportions,” McDonald says of the difference between a high-rise fit and low. To accommodate for this shift in proportions, ultra-low-rise jeans have different pocket scoops, smaller, shorter back pockets, and adjusted spacing between pockets.

Whereas the waistband of many skin-tight 2000s era ultra-low-rise was a V-shape in two pieces to be ultra form-fitting, today’s typically have a slightly curved waistband for a sense of cheeky “boyishness,” says McDonald. (Lucky’s ultra-low-rise does have a V waistband.) “One of the things that’s most exciting about a low-rise jean is just how appealing your bum looks,” she says. “It creates the cutest boyish, bum shape.” The curved waistband is meant to prevent gapping, but also helps keep the pant up even though it generally sits at the widest part of the hipbone. 

“I see all of the women that are adopting this that were afraid of it at first and we’re like, oh, actually it’s great it looks good on them,” says Reynolds. “It’s all ages, all body types, and all attitudes, and so I’m really proud and impressed with the outcome and the adoption that’s happening across the board.” She adds, “It’s one of those things you sort of have to get out of your mind and just put it on, right? For anything new, there can be a resistance and you’re like, ‘Oh wait, I love this.’”

I tested a several pairs in my usual size. One of the best was the Gap long and lean ’90s loose, which had a touch of stretch and contour waistband which didn’t, well, gap. Neither did Still Here’s Sport or Reformation’s 100% cotton low-rise Cary, although it had the most mid-rise fit in my usual size.

It’s not foolproof though. Agolde’s low-rise loose epitomized the cool sort of ease you want with low-rise denim: a perfectly stiff, nonchalant straight leg silhouette, balanced with a just-low-enough waistband that had a touch of looseness at the hip—though it did gap to reveal my underwear while seated at the bar. A charm opportunity, if I’m brave.

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