By now, you’ve surely noticed it. Jean waistlines, sky-high not so long ago, are going lower. Low enough that you might need to think of underwear as outerwear. 

Across the fashion industry, experts agree that in 2026, ultra-low-rise will be a key business driver in the denim sector, with some brands saying that their low-rise styles have replaced the eternally popular high-rise as their best selling cut.

“What we’re going to see in this next decade is [it’ll be] really dominated by the low-rise,” says Amy Williams, CEO of Citizens of Humanity group, which also owns the premium denim brand Agolde. “Right now, you’re sort of at that early stage where people are just now getting a feel for it.” 

If you pay attention to the runways or street style, you might have already picked up on this shift, as celebrities, models, and on-trend normies started trading in high-waisted jeans for pairs that sit low on the hips in the past couple of years.

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But the real tell is that low-rise jeans finally hit mass market. In 2025, global brands with slower–to-adopt consumers like Gap found their large customer base was finally ready for the navel-gazing silhouette. “We’ve been kind of waiting for this moment,” Noelle Rogers, senior vice president and general manager of Gap Specialty, told me last August. “We tested a few times on low-rise and it wasn’t until the last 9, 10 months that the customer was ready.”

Now denim designers are pushing low-rise further.

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