Notes on Time

Low-rise jeans, nostalgia, and the cosmic vastness of denim.

It’s the summer of 2009. I am in the shops with my mum and I pull out a pair of high rise skinny jeans. They’re black. They’re half lycra. They’re like a disco-pant but denim. I saw Alexa Chung in some. I saw a very cool girl at my school who said she was going to be a model wearing some. I beg my mum for them.

Then comes a slide into Mom Jeans. Into a Jean I wouldn’t have been seen dead in. But after a decade of being nicknamed Lucy Lump (affectionately) by my sisters, I finally have a wall of denim to encase my little belly in and I feel safe.

Those. Days. Are. Gone.

Listen. Baggy jeans are a recession indicator. But coupled with the lowrise - it’s giving “skinny is rich, bitch” - and after over a year of hearing about more and more friends going on the Munjaro, I’m disinclined to disagree.

This isn’t going to be a boring milennial essay about how you can prize my skinny jeans out of my cold dead hands. I haven’t worn a pair since 2019. This isn’t going to be a body positive rant about Ozempic (If I were rich I would be jabbing myself silly).

Instead this is a contemplation on the nature of time.

This is not the first time I have witnessed a style revolution. We all knew our rara skirts and footless tights were part of the 1980s revival. So were our skinny jeans and our chevron. Our oversized silk shirts and Mom Jeans brought us into the 1990s revolution. We’ve seen snippets of 60s and 70s resurfacing, and more recently everyone is obsessed with the y2k resurgence. This is old news.

Caggie Dunlop in Mom Jeans 2016

This is, however, the first time I’m viewing the endless gulf of time looping itself back - it’s a stitch, hemming us in to a moment, a viewpoint. I watch TikToks of women my age waxing lyrical about “What the club was like in 2015” and think about how funny it is to talk about our youth with this kind of passion and detachment.

I wonder if my mum gave a fuck in 1993 (the year she was the same age as me) about what virgins who can’t even drive thought about her aesthetic, her hair, the cut of her clothes. I think she didn’t.

And yet I still feel a pull to be cool. I still feel this weird sense that I don’t want to age. I don’t want to become my mother. Are men talking about this? Has this affected them at all?

It’s strange, isn’t it, standing on the other time of 30 gazing down at our fifteen year old selves deep within the recesses of our minds. I bet you don’t even really remember who she really was - rather who you wish she were.

The truth is, you were lame. We were all lame.

Sociologist Georg Simmel called the need to conform, and the need to stand out the dialectics of fashion. This tension between being in or being out is what drives the cycles of culture.

For the teenage girls that now drive online fashion cycles this is definitely true. But what about those of us who now exist outside of that group? It’s just not. The tension is made up in our heads between the imagined 15 year old we were, and the thirty-somethings we are.

I am not saying we’re not fashionable, stylish, or chic. I’m simply saying that we’ve been spat out the other side of the machine. Our cycles are on a separate wheel, now.

And with that comes this strange lengthening of time. The longer I sit here wearing a jumper I’ve owned since 2012, that I can’t help but notice how much time has passed since an 18 year old girl bought it on sale in New Look. I heaven’t even seen a New Look on a high street since Covid.

What this does is split cultural time from personal time - as it has always been split. Like the realisation that this is your parents’ first time doing life too, you realise that this isn’t the first time you’re moving through the cultural cycle. And I think there’s a jaded detachment that appears here that has only really been going since the birth of youth culture in the former half of the 20th century.

Every generation believes in saving the world at 20. Then they’re back in the same cut of denim they wore in their childhood, and the world isn’t any closer to being saved, and something in them dies.

This then manifests as both detachment and nostalgia.

Do you find yourself watching and rewatching your own content like a guy in an action movie watches videos of his dead wife?

I think this, ultimately, results in a dilution of our sense of the self-in-the-moment. Perhaps especially because this is the first time that this entire cultural cycle is being viewed at the micro level - from the devices in our hands. We view our youth, and the self-in-the-moment through the same nostalgia-filter.

The loop of making, watching, and remaking links up with the loop created in fashion cycles, synchronises with the loops of generations, with the eternal cosmic turning of the earth around the sun around the central point of the universe. And within the vastness we begin to lose ourselves, I think.

Lost in ever increasing swathes of denim around our legs. In the gulf of time between youth and death. In the amount of friends who’re in the jab. Lost in the attempt to define who we are as we are swept from the forefront of culture as more and yet more young people come to carry the torch of change for their turn pushing.

And what does all of it mean?

I look back at my fifteen year old self and know that I was lame but I was trying. I want to frame my jeans. I want to stop the everwidening gulf between this self and that one. I’d rather die than be 15 again.

I think once we stop chasing youth or even chasing the trend cycle, there could be a safety in accepting the self-in-the-moment. Even if you’re lost in the cosmic vastness of time and cloth. It’s a safety vaguely reminiscent of high rise denim. For you, it’ll be different. But for me, that’s where it sits.

I think the fact that low-rise wide legged jeans are in right now is funny and interesting. Godspeed to you, girlies.

Thanks for hanging out for this extended shitpost on jeans and the meaningless of existence. I’ve been your host, Goose, and this has been Goose FM. Up next….