Skinny pants, bell bottoms, leather jacket: Google fashion in 2021

“Are… in style?”. Is this in fashion? That was one of the questions that the Google answered this week in your annual “Search of the Year”, a kind of retrospective of the subjects and terms that aroused the most interest and demonstrated a growth in the platform.

Not top 10, fringe, skinny pants, cargo shorts, overalls, long boots, denim and leather jackets, trousers mouth-of-fate, off shoulder blouses and vests, timeless items and pieces that were successful in other decades. CNN chose four of them, to show that there are pieces that never go out of style.

Leather jacket

Now a wildcard, adaptable to a multitude of wardrobe styles and versatile for different occasions, the leather jacket was originally designed by Irving Schott in 1928 at the request of Harley Davidson. At the time named Perfecto, in reference to a Cuban cigar brand, the piece spent the first decades more recurrent among bikers, but in the 1950s it was associated with the youth rebellion of the post-World War II period, as an alternative to suits.

The films “The Wild One” (1953), starring Marlon Brando, and “Mistranded Youth” (1955), with James Dean, contributed to the popularization of the leather jacket. Fashion gained increasing prominence as a number of artists from the 1960s and 1970s adopted the piece in performances – such as Elvis Presley and members of the Beatles, Ramones and Sex Pistols.

With that, the leather jacket started to be seen on the catwalks of fashion shows and, in the 1980s, singers like Madonna and Joan Jett joined the piece, increasing the adhesion of the female audience to the trend. For some years, the fashion industry has been seeking to update animal leather models for alternatives with less environmental impact, and there are already leather production technologies from vegetable raw materials: cacti, pineapple fiber, banana peel, hemp and even fungal mycelia can be used to produce a leather that generates less carbon emissions and pollution.

denim jacket

The battle is fierce to decide which of these two items is the most versatile and timeless, but one thing is for sure: the denim jacket came before the leather model. Created at the end of the 19th century by Levi Strauss, founder of Levi’s, the garment was developed for rural workers: durable and efficient to protect the peasants from the cold, later the denim jacket was also adopted in the western United States, which originated the piece’s relationship with the classic western aesthetics we know today.

As an informal item with roots in the working class, the denim jacket gained a historical symbology of rebellion, later associated with counterculture movements in the 1940s and 1950s. every season and also making success with vintage models.

bell-bottom pants

Icon of the 1970s and 1990s, the bell-bottom pants had a different history from previous pieces: the appreciation for them was more oscillating depending on the period. Anyway, this is an item with a lot of history. Marked by the tighter modeling on top and flooded from the knee down, the bell-bottom pants have records from the 19th century, when American sailors wore the piece.

Much later, cultural currents such as the hippie movement of the 1960s, disco music and house music were marked by the frequent use of this model of pants. Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Abba and Black Sabbath are some of the artists and bands that have adopted the bellmouth in their looks. And let’s not forget John Travolta in the classic “Saturday Night Fever” (1977), which immortalized the play on movie screens. In the 1990s, the item returned, generally adopted in lower-waisted models by artists such as Liam and Noel Gallagher, from Oasis, members of Blur and Spice Girls.

Skinny pants

The most controversial towards the end. Since the beginning of the year, the piece has been an object of contention between millenials and their Generation Z contemporaries. The former grew up in the golden period of the skinny, model in tight jeans at the waist, hips, legs and ankles. The play was practically a uniform among indie rock bands such as The Strokes, The Kooks and Arctic Monkeys, and was also popular with celebrities such as Kate Moss, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

In fact, it is a versatile item in terms of occasion, season and gender, but it refers to a time of excessive cult of extremely thin bodies like those of the models at Victoria’s Secret. This is the central criticism of Generation Z, who seem to despise the piece not only in terms of aesthetics, but mainly because of what it represents. Guided by the convenience to choose their looks, those born after the mid-1990s prefer models that are looser and that offer comfort to a wider range of body shapes. The aversion to skinny pants, however, is far from being a consensus. In a survey commissioned by Lycra, 61% of Brazilian women said they prefer skinny pants over other jeans.