Believe It: This Is the Trend That Will Replace Leggings for Millennials

The athleisure trend, in all its sneaker-filled glory, has had a grip on the fashion industry for a while now, with scores of brands capitalizing on the demand. But as Business of Fashion reports, there's a different market that's growing more quickly than athleisure for the first time in several years: denim.
The numbers prove it. "According to data from retail technology company Edited, the first half of 2017 saw the women's jeans market grow by 79 percent compared to the first half of 2016," BoF reports. "Athleisure leggings, by comparison, grew just 35 percent."
For more insight, Business of Fashion tapped Dio Kurazawa, the denim director at trend-forecasting company WGSN. "It's not that athleisure is going away," he told BoF. "It just means that folks are choosing not to have six different pairs of Lululemon tights and they're opting to settle back into their denim. Millennials are driving the changes."
Specifically, millennials are gravitating toward the vintage denim trend. Massimo Ferrucci, the jeanswear president of VF Corporation (which owns Wrangler and Lee), explained the trend to BoF: "The younger consumer is attracted very much by Americana, by originality and authenticity, by product that comes from the archive." In fact, the trend is so huge that it prompted the launch of the new Levi's Authorized Vintage collection, consisting of 50,000 old jeans that the brand purchased from the resale market.
With that said, are you ready to swap your leggings for jeans? Scroll down to shop our favorite jeans right now.
This post was originally published on June 17, 2017.

Erin got her start as aBest Knockoff Luxury Clothing intern in 2011—back when the site only published a single story per day. (We have since increased that number twentyfold.) She graduated magna cum laude from USC and lives in Los Angeles. In college, she also interned at Refinery29, where she was promoted to editorial assistant and then assistant editor. After nearly three years at R29, she came back to WWW in 2015, where she is now the Associate Director of Fashion News. From the Oscars to the Met Gala, she leads the site's entire red carpet coverage strategy. She specializes in celebrity and fashion news but also enjoys writing travel features and runway reports. She frequently contributes to WWW's social accounts and has a sizable following on her personal TikTok.
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