In a world of endless possibilities and expression, how did things come to this?
When I was a teen in the 2000’s, and low rise trousers became the norm, it felt like a revolution- the next stage of fashion. It felt like the future. The old anxieties and conservatism of the 80’s and 90’s were replaced by a tech optimism, and a bold statement: A statement that we were no longer going to care about hangups of the past; it was time for us to embrace the future. Bodies were no longer taboo. We wanted to be cool. We wanted to be sexy. We wanted to be fearless. We wanted to innovate. And boy, did that reality come to pass.
Low rise pants, baby. It was the future. It was a statement without the need to say anything. It was adopted without the need to be forced. If you didn’t adopt it, you were left behind (where you belonged).
I could say a hundred thousand things about high waisted pants and their return. Instead I’ll only say a few: Their return signifies and represents the repression and backwardness of thought, expression, freedom, and style, from the year 2011 onwards. The worst, most exploitative and toxic corporations, fed on a steady diet of advertising income and clickbait manipulation tactics, took over the entire world. They took over the world’s collective mind: The world’s standards, their humour, their entertainment, and most tragically, their style.
Once a symbol of the old and slow to adapt “mom”, high waisted pants came back without anyone’s consent, to exploit the newly-minted insecure self-hating market. After a steady diet of social media sludge, the average ad-targeted algo-influenced girl was taught to hate her body, and her clothes had to be updated to reflect that.
THIS ONLY TARGETED GIRLS. Men and men’s clothing did NOT adopt this anti-style disease. Proof that it was an aggressive manipulation campaign, is that it only targeted women and girls.
A lot can change in a small amount of time, especially when the most powerful forces in the world are behind that change. Some great changes only happened in the space of a year, and some awful changes did too. For 10 years, no one had a problem with low rise pants. Everyone loved the style, the symmetry… no one wanted to go back to the past and look like an idiot. Until the psychological experiment that is social media came along, and beamed to an addicted, unhappy populace that they were ugly, and that they needed to hide it.
There wasn’t necessarily a demand: the market doesn’t need to respect or listen to our demands. They created the conditions where such high-waisted pants would be welcomed, and then they made them. That’s what really happened. An entire society got mind-raped. And then, over time, that same person will make social media posts about how much they hate low rise pants and they’re glad they’re gone, and a string of vague excuses why high waist pants are better. Feeding more lies into the mouth of the monster, as it vomits it back into the eyes of the audience. A self-contained self-sustaining lie, that’s what social media is. And now, that’s what the whole internet is. What part of the internet isn’t social media anymore?
I remember a time when there was a huge variety of styles. There were archetypes, but a huge variation of styles. Ironically, even though there were patterns and tropes and groups, everyone who adopted a style felt so individualistic. Can you tell me, honestly, the difference between 500 people wearing high waisted pants? Because I cant. They all look the same. They all look bland. They’re all unhappy. And they make everyone who sees them unhappy.
Recommending high waisted pants to anyone who feels insecure is like recommending hard drugs to anyone who feels sad; sometimes exposure therapy is good. And its no irony to me, my friends, that people are dressing up with less and less options, but spending more and more time on social media. The correlation IS DIRECT.
Here’s an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article in late 2010 about high waist jeans, when this “fashion” first started to take off again (Source below):
Some horrors are unspeakable, and one such horror is high waisted bikini bottoms and underwear. Granny panties for young people… the abomination speaks for itself. Its just a direct result of the 2011 downfall picking the meat off of anything that is remotely good or normal. Deforming even the most basic things like underwear to no one’s satisfaction and at no one’s demand. These aren’t the only casualties of the social media addiction complex, other basic facets of women’s fashion like sensible looking collars got terraformed into exclusively square, BOXY collars that look asymmetrical and weird on any woman.
Whats the solution? Well, the solution the spend zero time on the corporate internet machine. People want to innovate, they want to invent, they want to make, but this machine sucks all the energy and inspiration from us. Close it, turn it off, and the world will find balance again. One of the reasons I decided to make this website instead of using a blog site that already exists, is because I want to make, I want to invent, I want to express myself. And the system in place now exists to suppress and corral us into predictable behaviour patterns.
If you want to be an individual, if you truly want to breathe and feel real, get off these digital traps and make a unique place for yourself. If you want clothes that look cool, you’ll have to make and sell them yourself. If you want to learn how they made it before, buy and old pair, and learn it yourself. The future is in our hands, no matter how much these corporate warlords want us to feel numb to it.
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