Until my early 20s, the shape of my legs was one of the world’s great mysteries. Twigs or tree trunks: it was anybody’s guess. I spent my waking life in loose-fit, skater-inspired denim, slung low, and usually frayed and revoltingly filthy at the hem. These jeans were my message to the world: Forget it — I’m not dressing up for you.Things changed drastically in early 2006. I remember picking up my first skinny jeans in Urban Outfitters, eyeing them with the wary curiosity of somebody being served snails for the first time. They seemed so unforgiving, so peculiar, so very different from what I considered to be “jeans.” And yet, within a few moments of maneuvering myself into them, I was head-over-heels in love. I spent the next several months being told, "You've lost so much weight!" — but I had not. It was just that, suddenly, people could see my actual figure. Moving to London that year with my degree, a brand-new hairstyle, and my freshly unveiled limbs, I felt like a modern Melanie Griffith in Working Girl.The last decade, for me, has played out against a glorious spectrum of skinnies. There were gray, Kate Moss-homage jeans in 2007, so obscenely tight that a colleague told me I had to stop wearing them. There was a red J Brand pair in 2011, which seemed to go out of fashion about five days after I bought it, swiftly followed by an animal-print pair in 2012, cropped to a length that made me look like I’d just had a growth spurt. There were dozens of pairs of blue jeggings, all of which would begin to pull apart at the seams after a month or two, and there were the great-with-anything black skinnies that became my uniform for 2015.But drainpipe-devotee that I am, I’m also a journalist who writes about fashion. Those tight, tight jeans may have limited the blood supply to my brain — but they haven’t been enough to distract me from the news that skinnies are no longer “cool.” According to a study by WGSN , there were 93% more wide-leg jeans on the spring 2016 runways compared to the previous spring. Skinny jeans had dropped off by about 3%. Not a catastrophe, but when you turn to street style , the plot thickens: Editors and other fashion-forward types have long since moved on to other kinds of denim, be they flares, culottes, mom jeans, or boyfriend cuts. The skinny jean — and I say this as someone who still has eight pairs hanging in her closet — has tipped into the passé.