Even Britney couldn’t pull them off.

The first time I ever thought about high-rise jeans was in the middle of my freshman year of high school, in 2014, during a lecture about DNA in my biology class. My teacher stopped the class to announce that high-rise jeans were ugly and didn’t flatter anyone’s body type. At the time, I just accepted that information as fact. She should know, shouldn’t she? She had seen trends come and go.

And then it occurred to me that she was my biology teacher, not a fashion expert. 

Looking back, low-rise jeans are such a strange concept for women’s pants. In this article, I’ll be focusing on women’s pants because the main difference in men’s pants comes down to personal preference, since men’s bodies are more straight up-and-down: it just comes down to how long a man wants his legs to look and if he wants to tuck-in his shirt. For women, the waistband of low-rise jeans comes up to somewhere in the mid-to-low region of the hip bone, which is such an unflattering place to hit on a woman’s body. These jeans cut off any shape a woman may have, whether she is curvy or not. If she is curvier, the low-rise jeans would create a horizontal line right in the middle of her hips, which would ruin the line she should be trying to highlight. And if a woman is less curvy, low-rise jeans ruin any illusions and make her look even more boxy. This is not to say that women need to make sure their jeans sell them as attractive merchandise, or that flattery should be the number one priority. It just doesn’t make sense to hop onto an ugly trend. Also, when celebrities like Britney Spears used to flaunt their low-rise jeans, they were always extremely low, which made daily activities such as bending and sitting down much more difficult than they needed to be.

Now, of course, no one really wears low-rise jeans. It was a trend of the early 2000s, a time when likely few people reading this magazine article were even cognizant of their fashion choices. Some people think that they could come back in style this year, but I choose to think that society has reached a point where we know what suits our body types and what does not. Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I can tell you right now that low-rise jeans’ comeback should never happen at all for everyone’s own good. Besides, wearing “ugly” clothes, such as chunky sneakers and puffer jackets, has been in fashion recently, so by that logic, maybe we should just call low-rise jeans “pretty” to ensure they never return. 

The real question is the debate between mid-rise and high-rise jeans. Mid-rise jeans come up higher on the hip bone than low-rise, and high-rise jeans come up even higher still above the hip bone, usually around the belly button. Mid-rise is the “ol’ reliable” staple that has always been around, while high-rise is the newcomer in town, challenging baby boomers as to whether they want to give into a millennial trend or be doomed to stylistically inferior pants for the rest of their lives.

There’s nothing wrong with mid-rise jeans, and they definitely have their positives. They come up high enough so the wearer can tuck in their shirt, and they are more comfortable due to the extra material. However, they leave me wanting more. High-rise jeans take a simple clothing staple and make them fashionable. They jazz up an outfit without having to put in more effort than it takes to simply put on the pants. A standard outfit of a t-shirt and jeans suddenly looks like a fashion statement with the addition of the higher waistband. It shows thought. High-rise jeans come up to what is usually the smallest part of a woman’s torso, which makes the pants more flattering for women of all shapes and sizes. Also, since the jeans come up higher than a normal pair of jeans, they make women’s legs look longer. 

Trends come and go, and high-rise jeans have definitely had their place in the spotlight for several years now, which could be a signal that it’s almost time for them to disappear for a while. Maybe during this time next year, no one will even touch their high-rise jeans, claiming that they shorten the torso too much or that they cover too much butt. Whenever that happens, just remember how good we all had it in our high-rise jeans.