Try to come up with a bigger runway-to-real-life hit than the Isabel Marant wedge sneaker. You can't, can you? No other shoe has affected what women wear on the street—for good and bad (there are a lot of awful copies)—more than her trainers with the hidden lifts. We bring it up because Marant unleashed high-waisted jeans on her Fall runway today. We've been seeing them at the high end of the designer fashion spectrum for a season or so, and they've been embraced by early adopters. But if they're going to go wide, it'll be because Marant did them her way.
Marant's way is super-high-waisted, with an extra band of denim—fitted but not corset-tight—creeping up toward the rib cage. She showed the jeans belted over everything from silk peasant blouses to fitted sweaters of the cable-knit and marinière-stripe variety, with a stacked-heel, strappy ankle boot. They looked capital-S Sexy on the twentysomethings stalking the designer's Palais de Tokyo venue, but Marant was wearing them backstage, too. As she pointed out, "I'm not 20, and I don't have a butt like these girls do." Still, she was looking pretty hot herself. There were other things worth calling out on her catwalk, not least of all the blouson-cut, blanket-motif jackets. But it's the jeans that are going to reverberate.
