Jeans are everywhere. You probably have one on rotation right now, one sitting in your laundry pile, and at least one pair that doesn’t fit but you keep around because hopefully that potassium-maxxing trick on TikTok will make the bloat disappear. You’ve also spent more time questioning if skinny jeans should have a place back in fashion more than your questionable life choices.
They have become impossible to live without — globally, over 2 billion pairs are sold each year, and the average American closet holds seven pairs. Which makes sense, because when in doubt, you reach for denim. Jeans have been everything from miner’s uniforms to Marlon Brando rebellion to Y2K low-rise chaos on TikTok today. They show up in protest photos, in first-day-of-school fits, in blurry tagged pics you’ll never untag. Even Ferrari once dropped a denim line — because apparently making the world’s fastest cars wasn’t enough.
But rarely do we think of jeans beyond their five-pocket, blue-wash, dual-seam form. In fact, denim might be one of the only categories in fashion where “innovation” has been mostly cosmetic — a shuffle between straight, slim, or bootcut silhouettes masquerading as change.
Not for G-STAR, though. In 1996, the brand introduced the Elwood: a pair of jeans designed not for the myth of denim but for the mechanics of the human body. Panels twisted around the leg, knees curved, seams bent to follow motion. It was denim as infrastructure. Refusing flatness, its evolutionary construction insist instead on three-dimensionality, on the architecture of anatomy itself.
The Elwood rewrote what jeans could be. Nearly three decades later, G-STAR has returned to this philosophy with Anatomic Denim, a project that treats denim as engineering. Alongside a cinematic campaign by filmmaker Jordan Hemingway and a monumental denim gorilla installation by Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren, the collection revisits denim as a structure built for bodies in motion. Hemingway’s visuals remove the props of sport, such as rings, poles, and bikes, leaving only athletes suspended in the choreography of movement as their bodies and jeans are locked into the same rhythm.
“From the very first call, I knew this one would be special”, shares Hemingway. The director adds that “G-STAR is a brand with real heritage but what makes them exciting is their appetite for reinvention and boundary-pushing. This project was exhilarating in every sense, full of creative and technical challenges that demanded invention. Working closely with their team to solve them wasn’t just rewarding — it was a joy.”
At its core of the new campaign are three designs: The Contor, a futuristic evolution of the Arc with architectural lines and a sculpted fit; The Kitoh, where engineered seams trace musculature, exaggerating shape and motion; and the iconic G-STAR Elwood (that even Balenciaga references), reimagined for 2025 with sharper anatomical tailoring. Together they suggest a future where denim is not just a fabric but a framework of architecture.
Which forces the question: if denim has always been the everyday, what happens when the everyday begins to move like skin, think like a machine, and carry the weight of both memory and myth? It seems, G-STAR has the answer, and it’ll only reveal itself once you’re actually wearing it.
To explore the Anatomic Denim collection, visit www.g-star.com.
Once you are done with this story, click here to catch up with our September 2025 issue.