Wait, are we really witnessing the return of bootcut Top Gear jeans? - British GQ

Denim Jeans are among the few garments in the sartorial canon that consistently transcend trends, whilst also helping to define them. 

When the hippies were spreading their message of free love and, in turn, manifold venereal diseases, back in the '70s, they did it wearing wide-leg bell-bottom jeans. This after the Mods/Teddy Boys wreaked havoc on mopeds/the dance floor wearing selvedge denim drainpipes in the decades prior, and long before the blue jean babies of 1980s America bought back the Levi's 501 with a derrière-defining vengeance. 

All three movements were entirely different in their motivations and modi operandi, and yet they all shared one common denominator: trousers made from hardwearing cotton warp-faced textile. 

Richard Milnes / Alamy Stock Photo

The nineties had grunger jeans and the early aughts had spray-on skinnies, the past few years has been all about a normcore-inspired straight leg, and now, for the forthcoming "vibe shift" – see Alison P. Davis's viral piece for The Cut: "A Vibe Shift Is Coming: Will Any Of Us Survive It?", which suggests we could be about to see the return of "early aughts indie sleaze" – the bootcut jean has made a shock reappearance.

First popularised during the mid-nineties and early noughties, when porcupine-headed townies would wear Levis' Twisted jeans o'erpuddling their Puma Mostros to go out boozing on Bacardi Breezers; the bootcut jean was later bought crashing back to earth by the bad-daddish likes of Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of the OG Top Gear gang, who seemed hell-bent on wearing nothing but ill-fitting, lightly flared jeans with 20-year-old deck shoes bought from the back of the Telegraph magazine. 

Baggy, saggy, and stone-washed so intensively that fingers of pale fabric spread out from the crotch like rays from a wretched sun, the Top Gear-coopted bootcut jeans (which were in fact inspired by the shit kicker-covering denims worn by men with rodeo pretentions in America's deep south) went on to be adopted by dads everywhere, and thus the bootcut jean went the way of the bell bottom and drainpipes before it, dying an ignominious death on the big sartorial scrap heap in the sky.