In the 2003 SNL sketch, a fake commercial voiceover describes a “nine-inch zipper” and says the pants are “cut generously, to fit a mom’s body.” The pants, the voiceover adds, are a garment that says, “I’m not a woman anymore. Calling a pair of pants “mom jeans” implied that they were frumpy or dowdy-“the absolute antithesis of cool,” according to Emma McClendon, the author of Denim: Fashion’s Frontier and a curator at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In the beginning, the mom prefix did to jeans what it does to everything else. Read: The terrible stereotypes of Mother’s and Father’s Day cards Mom jeans, profoundly uncool and then suddenly very cool, got their revenge: The cyclical nature of fashion (and a mid-2010s shift in the national mood) helped rescue and revive a style that was long overshadowed by reductive stereotypes about moms and motherhood. Today, the silhouette-thick, nonstretchy denim with a high waist, straight legs, and a moderately loose, or “relaxed,” fit-can regularly be seen on models, influencers, and “VSCO girl” types on Instagram.

Although the 2003 Saturday Night Live sketch that popularized the phrase mom jeans did so as a pejorative (and the jeans did languish in uncoolness for more than a decade afterward), they’ve enjoyed a recent renaissance. Mom jeans, however, are an exception-or at least, they are now. Fairly or not, dresses, underwear, and heels that could be described as “matronly” are, at least according to fashion authorities, to be avoided. To “mom dance,” for example, is to dance embarrassingly. When you inject the idea of motherhood into something, well, to put it bluntly, it loses its sex appeal. “A little motherly,” she texted, “but cute!” I was incensed, and it didn’t help that I could picture the devastatingly cheery thing my own mother would say if I told her about this insult: “What’s wrong with a mom haircut? Mom haircuts are low-maintenance.” Forty-five minutes into having short hair, I was officially growing it back out. I wanted a funky, razor-cut pixie, the kind that style gurus often imposed on America’s Next Top Model contestants at the time, and when I walked home afterward, I was thrilled with the results-that is, until I sent a grainy selfie I’d taken on my flip phone to a friend of mine from high school. When I was 19 years old, brimming with the kind of giddy, fragile confidence common to those who have just returned to campus to start their sophomore year of college, I marched into the edgiest salon in our particular suburb of Chicago and asked an objectively edgy stylist to shear off all my hair.

Make guy jeans into high wasted shorts