EWhat if 1993 was the year when all the planets aligned for low waist? “It is impossible to leaf through Miss Or Vogue without coming across a little woman-child with a thin waist whose pants slip on her non-existent hips,” explained at the time an article in the New York Magazine. Was its author thinking of the very young Kate Moss when writing these lines?
A year after her appearance in a Calvin Klein advertising campaign featuring her wearing oversized jeans revealing the elastic of her cotton panties, the model is in the magazine’s spotlight The Face. The one we nicknamed “the Brindille” strikes a pose wearing a slightly short black t-shirt and low-waisted pants.
That same year, 1993, the designer Alexander McQueen unveiled, under the auspices of the Ritz in London, his graduation collection, called “Taxi Driver”. And, above all, pants, bumster, whose waist is so low that it reveals the top of the buttocks. The turbulent Briton will once again parade it on the catwalk for his fall-winter 1995-1996 collection. “For me, this part of the body – not so much the buttocks as the lower spine – is the most erotic part of a man or woman’s body,” he will later explain in the columns of Guardian.
Crop top and piercings
Long before fashion advertising or runway shows, the low waist made its debut in pop culture. Star of the 1960s and 1970s, bell bottom pants cling as best they can to the hips of hippies, who go so far as to tear off the belt to better show off their pelvis. Symbol of rebellion and evocative of an assumed sensuality, this hip hugger (“hip cinchers”) barely covers the intimacy of the rock stars of the time – Jim Morrison, Robert Plant, Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop…
Different times, same morals: in the 2000s, sugary pop replaced rock and the idols of the time were Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, Christina Aguilera and Beyoncé. Not one escapes the current fashion: crop top, navel piercing and, therefore, low waist.
Thirty-one years after the article in New York Magazine, the low waist is once again in the news. Relaunched by the raw-edge cut microskirts from the Miu Miu spring-summer 2022 collection, adopted by a new generation of creators nourished by the 2000s (Coperni, Courrèges, Miaou, Nicola Brognano for Blumarine, etc.), it’s barely if its codes have changed. Always unisex, available on a three-piece suit, a skirt, jeans or jogging pants, it continues to drag clothes (and fashion?) down.
