By Jacob Gallagher If straight-leg jeans are … well, straight, twisted jeans feature legs that bend inward, like the curved limbs of a horseshoe. Envision a jeans-wearing cowboy astride a horse. Now imagine that those jeans get stuck that way permanently, their legs arching like a wishbone. Most prominently, twisted jeans have a bowed seam that veers forward to the front of the jeans, meeting your shoe laces for a little confab. It’s a specific shape. And yet, in the jeans market, the twist is in. The Swedish mainstream minimalists at Cos sell $169 jeans with a mighty swooping seam, while Levi’s “twisted baggy wide leg” jeans offer a more modest bent, bowing forward about 5 or so degrees. Alaïa’s twist will cost you: That company is selling $1,400 jeans with mirror-image seams on each leg cutting across it like two italic slashes. Lemaire, the zippy French label, has for years sold twisted denim pants with curvaceous legs and convex seams. It calls them “a Lemaire classic” on its website and often shows them on the runway. The style is equally appealing to labels more native to Instagram, like Poolhouse, an upstart New York brand selling twisted “dad jeans” that call to mind nothing so much as Popeye the Sailor Man. (Popeye may have been the original barrel-cut jean paragon.) “It’s an instant gratification because you can look at somebody that’s wearing twisted jeans and know that they’re in twisted jeans because the seam is directly in front of you,” said Luis Osuna, the owner of Silverlake Market, a vintage shop in Los Angeles. Osuna is familiar with twisted jeans in their comparatively prehistoric form as part of the Levi’s 1990s and 2000s collections. Like Onitsuka Tiger sneakers and ringer T-shirts, bent jeans from the Levi’s RED and Engineered lines are a Y2K style affectation that is bouncing back around. He has watched those jeans sell for a couple hundred dollars. “It’s a subtle detail, but it communicates something,” Osuna said. The twisted jeans micromoment is a reminder that fashion trends are often fueled by the narcissism of small differences. The seam was once there, now it’s here, and for people who clock such things, that’s a radical migration. “It’s not so different that anyone couldn’t wear it,” said Rebekah Ressler, who lives in Brooklyn and sells vintage clothes on Depop. She sources Levi’s Engineered jeans from Japan and has seen their price inch up over the past year. She recently sold three pairs for $150 each. “They are definitely getting harder to find, and they’re getting more expensive,” Ressler said. Elliot Duprey, a content creator in New York, recently bought a pair of black Lemaire twisted jeans. He didn’t try to overintellectualize his purchase. “It’s just a way to make wide-leg jeans interesting rather than just baggy,” Duprey said. That bowed shape, he added, is just “so cool.” The prevalence of the jeans could also be read as a shrewd effort by companies to keep shoppers shopping by making them anxious that their mere oversize jeans are not fresh enough. “It’s that classic thing of ‘Hey, we’re a brand, we’ve had the baggy, that’s had its headlines, what the hell do we do now?’” said Amy Leverton, the owner of Denim Dudes, a fashion forecasting consultancy that works with denim brands. “This one is very much about updating the baggy.” Just because a garment is an update does not make it a novelty. Rikke Korff, a denim industry veteran, conceived the original twisted shape back in 1999 during her time at Levi’s. (The patent for the shape, filed for by Levi’s in 1999, credits Korff as its inventor.) “I wanted to come up with a construction style that felt really modern, really simple and, at the same time, had a feeling of being hyperfunctional,” Korff said. She plucked the twisted idea from authentically aged Levi’s shrink-to-fit 501s, which were known to bow naturally at the seams after being submerged. “When I heard that, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is brilliant — I can use it,’” she said. Her original design was a radical reimagining of how jeans should sit: The seat drooped willfully, and the side seams curled around, like a car careening out of its lane. The jeans were, to use a polarizing term, a touch steampunk, with architectural panels and articulated seams like the shell of a robot. (Levi’s introduced them with a freakish ad in which the models’ limbs twisted around like the hands on a clock.) As for Korff, she left Levi’s four years after the twisted jeans were introduced, breaking out on her own as a designer. Still, the RED jeans are a creation she can’t shake. “I keep getting some phone call from some person who wants to make a new version or a copy,” she said. Overall, she’s pleased to see the twisted concept still spinning around on the market. “It’s now just in the ether,” she said. “People use it freely however they want.”
