It's been well chronicled how athleisure styles like yoga pants and sweatpants are eating jeans's lunch and growing to dominate the broad genre of clothing you can wear on your legs. Children may hate wearing denim, but that doesn't mean our good ol' American standbys are on the verge of going the way of the Dodo. In fact, research firm NPD just dropped a little study that showcases how millennials in particular are driving denim sales up.
The very demographic that swore off jeans in favor of wearing sweats and joggers has apparently come back around. Denim sales among millennials grew 2% even though denim as a whole fell 5%. Make no bones about it, denim is still struggling a bit against competition, but it isn't going to die off without a fight. Marshal Cohen, NPD's chief industry analyst, actually dropped some prescient quotes in this little news blurb that showcases how denim can get back in the game, saying, "There are missed opportunities across the denim retail landscape, from the limited distribution of classic styles, fuller cuts, and peripheral specialty sizes, to the absence of color that is living large in so many other industries."
Now, fuller cuts are definitely back in style, as we've seen lately despite the fact it's not a look we're ready to fully endorse because we still wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, screaming, "JNCOS!" And I'm not sure colored denim is necessarily the way to fix some of the ills jean companies are feeling because colored denim on a whole is fucking embarrassing.
