Straight leg is the silhouette every other jean gets defined against. Skinny is straight leg with the ease removed. Wide leg is straight leg with volume added. Bootcut is straight leg with a flare grafted onto the last few inches. The category itself is almost defiantly plain: a leg opening roughly the same width as the thigh, running the same width from hip to hem, with no taper and no flare doing any extra work. It’s the denim equivalent of a plain white shirt — the silhouette other silhouettes borrow their identity from by deviating.
That plainness is deceptive, though, because “the same width throughout” is a narrower target than it sounds. A straight leg that’s cut too full at the thigh and hem alike isn’t straight — it’s a wide leg that hasn’t committed. One that’s cut close through the thigh and only opens slightly at the hem isn’t straight either — that’s a taper, doing a straight leg’s marketing. The real thing runs true the entire way down, which is also why it’s the hardest of the major silhouettes to get right off the rack: there’s no forgiving taper to hide a fit problem, and no dramatic volume to distract from one.
It’s also the silhouette with the least decade attached to it. Skinny jeans read as the 2010s. Bootcut reads as the early 2000s. Wide leg keeps cycling back to the 70s and, more recently, the 90s. Straight leg has been in more or less continuous rotation since Levi’s 501s defined the category in the first place — which is less a fashion statement than an admission that a well-proportioned straight line through the leg never really stopped working.
The trade-off is that straight leg does less styling work than the other silhouettes, for better and worse. It doesn’t sculpt like a skinny jean, doesn’t make a statement like a wide leg, doesn’t retro-signal like a bootcut. What it does is fall the same way on more body types than almost any other cut, which is the entire reason it’s outlasted every jean that was supposed to replace it.
Micheal kors