In Praise of Mom Jeans
A Mother's Day Tribute to High-Waisted Pants
Hello, everyone:
It’s been a while since I wrote a newsletter, for exciting reasons that I’ll be sharing with you in about a week. (Hint: it has to do with a new book.)
I’m still pretty overwhelmed, but in honor of Mother’s Day weekend (and to welcome the new readers to our community) I wanted to share an essay I wrote about pants. Or, more specifically, those high-waisted marvels of denim known as Mom Jeans.
It’s an essay that I originally wrote way back in 2019, during the peak of the mom jean trend, and it was my attempt to draw parallels between society’s complicated relationship with mom jeans and our complicated relationship with motherhood itself. I shared it with some friends and tried a few times to get it published, but it never got picked up.
Now here we are in 2025, a time when many things feel like they’re moving backwards for women, and sources who are much more up on trends than I am have told me that the Mom Jean Era may be coming to a close. “Boyfriend” jeans, they say, are in. And, horrifyingly, it appears we may be about to witness the return of low-rise pants.
Readers: I object. There are many things in life that are out of our control, but one thing that all of us can control—that we must—is whether our pants sit comfortably on our midsections, and whether our lives reflect who we actually want to be.
To scrolling less, living more, and figuring out the perfect fit—
In Defense of Mom Jeans
I clearly remember the first time I tried on a pair of low-rise jeans. It was the late 90s and I was about 16 years old, standing in the place where most of my teenage fashion decisions were made: a dressing room at the Gap.
“Well, that’s odd,” I thought as I pulled them up. There seemed to be at least an inch of fabric, maybe two, missing from the top of the pants.
At first, I assumed there must have been a manufacturing error. But a second pair confirmed that no, these jeans were designed to end at the awkward no-man’s land between crotch and waist. The result was that a handful of my newly developed hip flesh—a natural part of a woman’s body that when extruded above one’s waistband is known, derisively as the “muffin top”—was being excluded from my pants, against its will, and with uncomfortable results.
Anyone over 35 knows the pants I’m talking about. They’re the ones euphemistically referred to as “hip huggers,” despite the fact that they don’t hug your hips at all—that is, unless your definition of a “hug” is to cut someone in two. They’re the pants that seem to have been designed by a misogynistic sadist, someone who takes exquisite, perverse pleasure in watching us hike our pants up and pull our shirts down, again and again, on a Sisyphean quest to cover a part of our bodies that, frankly, should have been our pants’ responsibility all along.
I hated these pants, and yet I wore them for years, engaged in an endless fight against my own supposedly extraneous flesh. Like many women of my generation, I assumed that I didn’t have a choice.
But I’ve since realized that we did have a choice. We had just been scared off by the name.
I’m talking about Mom jeans.
Yes, I know: Mom jeans—which in their most basic form are simply pants that end at a woman’s natural waist— have had a surge in popularity in recent years, and have been sighted on the lower halves of many of the young and trendy.
But when they first emerged, “Mom jeans” and “fashionable” were not used in the same sentence. Instead, that style of pants only existed in a place few women in their 20s and 30s dared to tread: Land’s End catalogues. Baggy and often pleated, they were given their official name in a parody ad that Tina Fey wrote for a 2003 episode of Saturday Night Live.
“For this Mother’s Day, don’t give Mom that bottle of perfume,” says the voiceover, as Fey, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, and Rachel Dratch frolic in their mom jeans in front of a painted backdrop of the sky. “Give her something that says, ‘I’m not a woman anymore. I’m a mom.’”
It was a statement that perfectly captured why, to women of my generation, it seemed that there was no way for us to win. Squeezing into hip huggers meant accepting one of the cruelest parts of the transition into womanhood: the loss of comfort in our own skin. But putting on mom jeans—whether literally or metaphorically—often represented an equally upsetting transition: the loss of our own identities.
As I entered my thirties and began to truly grapple with the prospect of having a child, I encountered reminders of this tension everywhere I looked. I saw magazines breathlessly announcing celebrity “baby bumps,” as if the most interesting thing about the person was the fact that she was pregnant. (Unsurprisingly, I did not see profiles of male celebrities announcing that they were about to become dads, let alone while wearing sunhats.) I saw the mom jeans in my own mother’s Land’s End catalogues, worn by women whose definition of “me” time appeared to be dressing their children in matching pajama sets and caring for golden retrievers.
What I didn’t see, what had been squeezed out of these pictures, were the women themselves. Not only had their sexuality been erased; their interests, their passions—the things that had made them them—were now treated as superfluous indulgences, unwelcome overflow. Whereas Mom jeans themselves are designed to accommodate a woman’s body, motherhood seemed as restrictive and uncomfortable as a pair of low-waisted pants.
When I eventually became pregnant, my anxiety grew along with my belly. I had trouble sleeping. I saw a therapist. I knew I was supposed to be glowing with anticipation, but instead all I felt was dread.
One day, my therapist posed a question as I sat listlessly on her couch. “What if you stopped trying to force yourself into society’s definition of motherhood?” she asked me. “What if you were able to create your own version that accommodated who you actually are?”
At the time, I wasn’t able to hear her. I was too consumed by fear. But in the years since then, I've reflected on her words repeatedly and done my best to follow her advice. For the most part, I do feel that I’ve succeeded: I’m a mom and I dearly love my daughter, but I have my own life, too. Trying to strike this balance is a continuing challenge, though, and it’s made me wonder why, in 2025, this still seems so hard. I have seen countless female friends struggle to maintain their own hobbies, careers, dreams, and social lives after starting families. Too often, the constraints and responsibilities of motherhood—and the lack of structural and societal support—end up squeezing out the people we were before.
But what if this could change? After all, “mom” jeans somehow transitioned from being the (well-covered) butt of jokes to genuinely trendy—a shift that continues to blow my mind. So what might happen if we expanded our conception of motherhood itself? What if we encouraged and supported women in creating identities in which we are mothers, yes, but also people—people with their own passions and interests and lives. And, if we succeeded, how might that change our daughters’ (and sons’) impression of what it looks like to be a woman and a mom?
When I think about this—and as I reflect despairingly on the potential return of low-rise pants—I’m reminded of the first time I put on a pair of mom jeans. It was several years after I’d had my daughter, the result of the season changing and me realizing that, after nearly three decades of forcing myself into pants that refused to accept my hips’ existence, I was ready for a change.
As I pulled them on, I instinctively sucked in my breath, expecting them to cut my body off, as usual, halfway up my hips. But instead, as I wrapped the waistband around my waist and zipped the seemingly endless fly, I felt the pants wrap me—the whole me—in a hug. And as they did, I felt my body relax—as if finally, after all these years, I’d finally found the perfect fit.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha to the introduction ! I was born in the late 1980s and cannot stand "natural-height-aka-high-waist" jeans. For a few years now, Ihave been holding on to and maintaining with much care my low-rise (not extra-low-rise, just below-the-muffin-low-rise) jeans in the hope the normal and extra-high-rises domination comes to an end before all my old pairs fall to piece (actually, they may have...I wear in public only non-jeans pants!). This was a good text for your long-awaited return. Thank you for the laugh and the essay!
I'm definitely moving to Canada if low-rise jeans come back. That's like the height of misogyny. Not only is there not a non-anorexic body on the planet on which those look good, but its another indication of the patriarchy's desire to see us back in baby-making mode with a zipper that short. I need you to work a little harder for it. As for motherhood, well, I feel the metaphor. And I thank you, sincerely, for acknowledging that women can both desperately want to become mothers and also be desperate for how to be a mother and themselves simultaneously. It is a conundrum that I, as the mother of an almost 7-year old, still have not worked out, and it is one of the primary reasons that we elected to have only one child, a reason that is not just unpopular but borders on sacrilegious if ever uttered out loud. Why do we shy away from the fact that motherhood is hard? And often uncomfortable. Adding societal expectations that we do it a certain way (with only 1-inch rise and without elastic) makes it downright impossible to feel, much less look good. What if there was more room, literally and figuratively, for us to play with the full possibility of what motherhood could look like? I, for one, am with the pants!