*Not true. At least probably not true, but I can’t really prove anything and haven’t fact-checked this either. Just go with it.
While getting dressed this weekend, I smiled dreamily and took in the sweet sound of the angels singing because at long last, those low-slung hip hugger jeans have fallen out of fashion. If you want to know why, grab a glass of wine and gather ’round, kids. It’s a cautionary tale of youth and pride…but one that every woman should know.
A few years back, this hot, young and single fashion blogging trend-setter looked at her great bod and said to herself, “Imma show this off a little more.” She felt that the best way to do this was to dial up the attention paid to her flat stomach and narrow hips. I mean, I get it; she had it, so why not flaunt it? She found a pair of vintage ’70s low waisted hip huggers and pulled them on her svelte little legs just in time to snap a picture, post to her site and BAM! A trend was born.
Anyway, she rode this wave through her engagement to that J. Crew model-looking venture capitalist and in the pictures on their honeymoon 
to St. Barth’s, she looked AMAZING with tight fitting tops that showed her tanned midriff peeking out above her low-rise jeans. She kept this up during the first two years of marriage, even as she turned (gasp!) 30 because she went to the gym and did pilates and hot yoga and she and her husband Brock hiked together and ate all the right things and had gobs of money to spend only on themselves…therefore adding to her collection of low rise jeans. She had it all.
Then one day the greatest thing happened: she got pregnant! It was amazing. She was 31 and was going to be the cutest mom to the cutest baby with the cutest husband ever. She had a great nine months and delivered a healthy baby, just as the first snow fell. How wonderful, a winter baby! She swore that during the baby’s naps she would bring it to the gym’s childcare center while she sweat it out on the elliptical and got her post-baby bod back in shape in record time. It was going to be AMAH-ZING.
Only that didn’t happen. She was tired and cranky and the thought of spending 20 minutes packing up that baby (plus the 12 bags of crap that went along with it) to trudge out in the snow was simply too much to bear. Her sports bras didn’t fit anymore thanks to the loaner boobs that being a nursing mom had left her with, so that didn’t help the cause. Technically she could fit into her workout 
tights thanks to the stretchiness of the fabric (has the guy who invented Lycra been canonized yet, she wondered?) but it wasn’t pretty. Her hips seemed to have gotten about 10 inches wider when she wasn’t looking, and this was enough to scare her right back into her jammies. There was a foreign layer of body that seemed to POUR out over the tops of said workout tights, sending her into a fit of tears and running to the pantry where she happily dove headfirst into Brock’s stash of SuperBowl Sunday snacks. New Mom=1; Doritos=0.
She knew that something had to give and as a lightbulb went off in her head, she knew the culprit: it was the jeans. They were the devil’s work! How could she possibly right the ship so as to not muffin-top her way through her 30s? Wait a minute, she thought, I’m a trend-setter; what if I simply reverse the curse? Promote a new look that not only celebrates “a real woman’s body” (now that she finally had a real woman’s body) but also hides/contains that layer of skin that had stretched so far outwards but wouldn’t un-stretch back. One that covers up and contains these foreign hips she now had (seriously, WHEN did those get there?) and shifts the emphasize elsewhere. This new trend was to be the dawn of a new day, a beacon of hope to all moms out there, and would give them back their style (if not their former physiques)! She decreed that as of that day, hip huggers were no more and mid- and high-rise jeans were officially back. in.
And that, my friends, is how one brave (and tired and a few-pounds-overweight) woman saved the world.
(Next week – “Yoga Pants: They’re Not Just For Yoga Studios Anymore”)
Notes from the Ledge 