Best Jeans for Men
A man of 45 buys the same size and cut he wore at 28, finds the waistband digs in and the thigh pulls, and concludes that modern denim has stopped being made for him. His measurements changed and so did the standard rise. Both are fixable in an afternoon with a tape measure and 20 minutes in a fitting room. Here’s what you need to know about how to look good, even if you’ve hit that milestone age, and what are the best jeans for men over 40.
The Fit Problem After 40
Two measurements matter more than the label. The first is the thigh, taken about 25 mm below the crotch seam, because that is where most men over 40 run out of room in a slim cut. The second is the waist as it actually is at 4pm rather than at 8am.
A straight or slim-straight cut solves most of this. It keeps a narrow line through the calf and ankle while leaving 30 to 50 mm more room in the thigh than a skinny fit does. Tapered cuts are the other reliable option, narrowing from the knee down while keeping the seat generous. Anything sold as skinny or super skinny is designed around a body shape that most men do not have at 45 and did not have at 30 for that matter, either. Hem length is the third thing to get right and the cheapest to correct. A single break on the shoe, or no break at all with a boot, looks deliberate, and a tailor will shorten a leg for about the price of two coffees.
The Rise Measurement
Rise is the distance from the top of the waistband to the crotch seam, and it is the number that decides where the jean is worn on the body. Low rise is about 180 to 200 mm, mid rise about 200 to 240 mm, and high rise roughly 250 mm and upwards.
Mid rise works better for a cool look jean for most men over 40. It puts the waistband slightly below the navel, on a part of the torso that has not changed much, and it does not require a belt tightened to the point where the fabric gathers. Sizing charts rarely print the rise, so it is worth measuring a pair that already fits and taking the number shopping. Low rise puts the waistband on the hip bones, where every hour of sitting pushes it lower.
Age Gaps and Wardrobe Assumptions
A man of 45 who wants to flirt with a younger woman will often buy denim cut for a man of 25 instead of denim cut for himself. That looks like fancy dress. A mid-wash straight leg with a decent jacket give a great look and are the best jeans for men, doing more than the black skinny pair often seen on somebody 20 years younger.
The same problem turns up at a work dinner with colleagues half your age and also at the school reunion. In each case the question is what are the best jeans for men to wear and how to look current without looking borrowed.
Colour, Fading and Factory Finishes -Which Are the Best Jeans for Men?
Denim fades in a particular way for a chemical reason. Indigo coats the outside of the cotton thread instead of penetrating it, so the dye rubs off at the knee, the seat and the pocket edges while the fabric underneath stays white. That is the whole mechanism behind a worn-in pair.
It is also the reason indigo is an environmental problem. The dye rinses away into the water supply during manufacture, and the indigo in jeans is now almost entirely synthetic and produced at industrial scale. Producing a single pair takes roughly 3,800 litres of water on United Nations figures, with cotton irrigation accounting for about 92% of it. A mid-wash pair that fades naturally over 3 years is a better purchase than a pre-faded pair on every measure.
Pre-distressed denim is the single fastest way to look older than you are. Factory rips and whiskering are applied by machine to a template, so thousands of pairs leave the factory with identical fake wear in identical places. A 25-year-old wears that as a style choice. At 47 it looks like a garment bought pre-aged.
Buy the darkest wash you will realistically wear and let it break in. Raw and rigid denim takes about 6 months of regular wear to soften and will mould to the actual body wearing it, which no factory finish can do. If raw denim is too much commitment, a one-wash or lightly rinsed pair gets most of the way there. Wash whatever you buy inside out, in cold water, every few wears instead of after every wear, and hang it to dry. Heat and detergent do more damage to the colour than 6 months of wearing ever will. This way they’ll stay looking their best, and your jeans will last a lot longer.
The Return of the Skinny Jean
Runways have started putting the skinny jean back into collections after a decade of wide and relaxed shapes. This matters less than the coverage suggests. Trend cycles at the designer level take 2 to 3 years to reach the streets, and by the time they do they have usually been softened into something wearable.
Anyone over 40 can ignore the cycle entirely, to find the best jeans for men. A dark straight leg and a mid-wash tapered pair have been correct in every year since 1990 and will be correct in every year after this one. Buying into a silhouette at its peak means owning something dated in 30 months. The exception is to buy a genuinely relaxed leg, which has been the default in workwear for a century and looks normal in any year. And so, this has allowed them to have been the best jeans for men since forever.
The Origin of the Five-Pocket Cut
The shape has barely changed since Levi Strauss and the tailor Jacob Davis were granted their patent on rivet-reinforced work trousers on 20 May 1873. Levi Strauss supplied the money and the distribution, Davis supplied the rivets, and the five-pocket layout that resulted is the one still in production today, and still considered amongst the world’ best jeans for men
The dye is older still. Archaeologists working at a burial site in Peru found indigo-dyed fabric more than 6,000 years old, which makes indigo one of the oldest colours humans have deliberately produced. Synthetic indigo arrived much later, developed by Adolf von Baeyer, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1905 partly for that work.
The Assumption Behind Every Guide
Every guide to this subject, including this one, assumes the reader wants to look younger. The men over 40 who dress well are usually aiming at something else. They are dressing their actual age accurately, in clothes that fit, and letting the age be the least interesting thing about them. A well-cut pair of dark jeans on a 50-year-old says 50 on purpose, and that is a far harder thing to fake than youth.
# Best Jeans for Men
