Skinny, Leggins, or Jeggins ... The’yre all legs

Skinny jeans have been ubiquitous for a decade, worn by everyone from pop stars to politicians.They have come a long way since the Ramones wore slim-fitting denim in the 70s.  So what is the secret of their success?

Once you start seeing skinny jeans, it's pretty hard to stop. And the more you see of them, the clearer this becomes: the jeans might be narrow, but it's a broad church living in them.

Sloanes like them high-waisted, apparently having ironed the legs; emos wear them flatfooted and belted. Hipsters roll the ankles and prefer an imprecise crotch; and skaters like them with sneakers and a snapback.

How did skinny jeans come to hold us in such close grip? For all their bad press about being only for skinny people (admittedly, their name has not helped with this), skinny jeans are in fact benignly elastic and surprisingly democratic, stretching comfortably to include all shapes of bottom and all social groups.

They clothe the entire cultural spectrum, up to and including the next queen of England; all kinds of sexy, from Russell Brand to Nigella Lawson; and every musical genre from Lil Wayne through Justin Bieber and Girls Aloud to BBC2's chorister-in-chief, Gareth Malone.

They have become the first choice for first women, as testified by Samantha Cameron at the Conservative party conference last autumn and Michelle Obama. But they also clothe a good deal of the Occupy movement, not to mention Pussy Riot; there are pictures of Syrian rebels in skinny jeans.

 In Britain, mums on the school run wear them; so do their children at weekends. There is no lower age limit, just as DMX said: at Gap the smallest size of skinny is 0 months. Things do tail off at the other end of the spectrum, although "tailing off" is probably not how Ronnie Wood, 65, Karl Lagerfeld, 79, and former Conservative MP Teresa Gorman, 81 – all skinny jeans wearers – would see themselves.

"The punk revival has to have been the beginning of it," says Jane Shepherdson, the chief executive of Whistles, which lists 14 styles of denim on its website, all of them skinny. "I was a big Clash fan. That's when I wore them the first time around. I remember them getting narrower and narrower and thinking I could hardly get my feet in."

 "It is very hard to see us going back to wider jeans. If I could say there would definitely be one thing in the next [Whistles] range, it would be a pair of skinny jeans. I'm sitting in a taxi now," she says, "looking out the window, and the vast majority of people on the Euston Road are wearing them, men and women – all wearing them differently, but all wearing them."

There are other theories. "You can trace the skinny fit right back to the mid-18th century and a youth movement called the Macaronis," says Sarah Niblock, a professor at Brunel University who specialises in visual culture. "They were the first British fashion movement to use fashion to be subversive. They used to wear very slim-fit clothes." Niblock thinks you can draw a line from the Macaronis through cowboys, teddy boys and punk to now. "That narrow cut is very much about the outsider, about singling yourself out as somebody different."

So why are skinny jeans still going strong? Skinny jeans are open to all, and no one who wears them makes them any less of what they are for anyone else. The truth must be that there is something about the meanness of this look that feels right for our times. It can't simply be about rebellion – why should tightness seem inherently more rebellious than expansiveness?

For manufacturers, skinny jeans make perfect economic sense, requiring less fabric than more generously cut pants; for consumers, their ongoing domination keeps the rest of the wardrobe working too: no need for a costly revamp.

"It is a bit like wartime, not wanting to waste fabric and resources," says Niblock. "And in hard times people do tend to have a shared sense of identity. You couldn't associate skinny jeans with white fashion or black, young, old, straight, gay."  -The Guardian