Low-rise jeans falling out of favor

By Olivia Barker
USA Today

Love your navel? Belly-exposing pants often don't sit well. Associated Press

They've been taunting us from every magazine cover and department store rack. But after a two-year assault, the seat-baring trousers are taking a back seat to modesty — and comfort — in the closets of women 25 and older.

Even as retailers sink to new lows — Levi's is trotting out a teensy two-button fly — it's getting to the point where the only people still slinking into low-rise pants are plumbers, Britney Spears and her fans.

The reasons are manifold, style editors say. Many women simply don't have the boyish hips and fab abs to make the belly-baring jeans work. If they don't want to reveal a swath of skin, they have to buy all new, long-enough tops. And the pants don't typically pass muster with the boss.

"Everyone loved it for a minute, but it doesn't go with the mood right now," harrumphs Lida Moore Musso, senior fashion editor at Cosmopolitan. As catwalks flow with flouncy, neo-hippie peasant tops, "it's about sensuality now, a different kind of sexiness that's not so in-your-face. It's not about flashing your thong."

Recent runways showcased high-waisted looks from Prada and Max Mara. Style spies, meanwhile, are turning their eyes away from hips and midriffs and toward shoulders and necks.

Stores such as Old Navy and Express insist that sales of low-rider jeans remain strong.

"Everybody is wearing low-rise jeans," says Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive. "But there are also a lot of people who are kvetching about low-rise jeans because they create a lot of potentially hazardous situations." Like the undergarment issue.

In the magazine's March issue, four staffers put low-riders to some real-world tests, such as hailing cabs and crawling after the kids. The results would have attracted the decency police.

Leive calls them SRO jeans, as in "standing room only" jeans, "because as soon as sit you down, there's a serious chance of underwear or worse sticking out of the back of your pants."