Looking back a decade later, women asked themselves why they did it. “Low-rise pants are walking billboards for extreme thinness and androgynous frames, but high-rise styles can conform to bodies of all shapes and sizes,” said Rachel Syme, writing in The New Yorker in 2019. “They not only highlight hips and butts—they demand them.”

So it might seem like particularly bad news for ageing Millennials – and their mothers really – that the public enemy number one is back. Lyst says that searches for hipster trousers are up by 58 percent, while on resale app Depop, they are up 36 percent since the start of the year. The good news, though, is that low-rise jeans are mostly being worn by people who weren’t old enough to remember them the first time around. Or, more likely, who weren’t even alive. 

This means that anyone over 30 can choose to ignore the fad for hipster trousers altogether. But if you’d like to try them, take comfort in the fact that we live in an undoubtedly more forgiving era than Y2K. In the early Noughties, it was women’s bodies that were in fashion, not the clothes – and trends were born from the desire to show off tiny, size 6 figures. These were the days of Heat magazine’s circle of shame, after all. But thankfully popular culture has changed hugely in the last two decades.