I don't know that I'd call them bell-bottoms like the ones in the 70s (with skinny/normal legs, then large at the bottom). Pants in this style in the 90s and early 00s were really baggy all over and frequently dragging on the ground.
Kind-of. Think Austin Powers, Spice Girls, TLC, Oasis, Doc Martins. The late 90's definitely had some aspects that looked like a cultural revival of the 1960s that came out of slacker/ dropout culture.
In the late 90's, jeans with gigantic legs were in for both genders, IIRC jeans that were tight/normal down to the knee and then went completely conical down to a huge cuff were called "flares." Or you had the JNCO style 'eight sizes too big" parachute pants look, which was somehow completely separate to the "hammer pants" thing.
The early 2000s had their own take on bell bottoms. Unlike 60's70's bell bottoms which were worn much higher up on the waist, were fairly baggy their entire length with kind of ruffled cuffs worn by both sexes, 21st century bell bottoms were pretty much only a female thing, they were worn much lower at the waist overlapping the "hip hugger" trend, and were worn fairly tight down to lower calf and then had a significantly curved trumpet bell shaped cuff to cover the upper of the shoe but not sweep the floor like 90's parachute pants. Meanwhile guys wore a lot of boot cut carpenter jeans that all had that pointless hammer loop on the left leg.
It's not pointless if you work in a trade, I used to hang paint brushes on them sometimes, but yeah, I don't really wear them except a few times in the past I had manual labor jobs before I finished college.
We never referred to them as bell bottoms but by their brand name; Jncos. And they were rather popular for a subsect of teenage/young adult culture in the late 90s/early 2000s.
In contrast, I tried to buy a pair of "relaxed fit" men's jeans at Target a few years back, fit properly-to-a-little-loose around the waist, and I couldn't zip them up and have male genitalia at the same time. Had to triple check they were supposed to be for men.
Yeah, I got a bit of an ass on me, but I ain't a pear. Most relaxed they had were still skinny jeans. Makes me miss my hand-me-down D-Lux jeans (we were poor, couldn't afford Jncos... or new pants for the youngest child, apparently).
I graduated HS in 2000 and never really saw more than a very small handful of people wear JNCOs. I’m in northern Virginia though so maybe they just weren’t as popular around here. Didn’t see any JNCOs up in the Toronto area either.
I graduated in 2005, and by then bell bottoms on girls were back in fashion; they didn't quite hit the ground, there was just a little bit of the sole of her tennis shoe and a bit of toe visible. I kinda liked that look, then we went with 20 years of "heat shrink that ends an inch above the ankle" for some reason.
I just asked my wife who graduated 2001. She says they were popular late middle school/early HS which would have been like 96–98. I was in Canada at that time so makes sense I wouldn’t have noticed.
I remember the bell bottoms coming back. Big fan of the 2000s remix version.
Same age. In NYC it was skaters and ravers. I'd imagine any major metro is going to have more counter culture people. Especially back then vs now, when culture didn't have the same Internet pathways to diffuse so quickly geographically.
Lots of people talking about JNCO. But honestly kikwear had superior jeans and they had a stash pocket to get drugs in to raves. And Sutters were a stitch above the rest
To this day I do not know why tailors insist, when hemming pants, that the cuff must touch the ground. I always insist on it being a minimum of 2-3cm off the ground because of this very reason.