Where to start one’s autumn/winter 2026 drop-waist trend journey? How about in Notting Hill recently, above a shop that sells what appear to be sliced-up totem poles and the type of sun-and-moon items that were popular in the ’90s? There is an osteopath with magic hands, who says that if I stretch the front of my thighs like so (he kneels on the floor with one leg propped forward as if to propose), then eventually my posture will improve, my shoulders will rotate backwards and, crucially, my torso will appear longer.

This news could not have arrived at a better time considering a dachshund-proportioned body is very fashionable, according to Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel, where the belts were slung alarmingly low, and Miu Miu, which has been toying with a dipped waistband long enough now that a line of visible swimwear was birthed to style alongside it.

It would make sense for Blazy to wink at a low-waisted silhouette. It was, after all, Coco Chanel who first brought the new athletic look into vogue in the 1920s alongside Jeanne Lanvin and Jean Patou. This new way of dressing was, like most fashion trends, a rejection of what came before it. In this instance, the restrictive corsetry and social oppression of the Victorian era. The girlies just wanted to indulge in frivolous, fun things, like dancing the Charleston and securing the right to vote, and that meant burning their girdles and dressing .

I, however, have always had a hate-hate relationship with a drop waist. Proportionally, I don’t find it easy to carry off. But my friends know how much I dislike feeling left out and that the most effective way to get me somewhere is to say I won’t like it. Thanks to this contrary impulse, I found myself, late last year, wearing an ivory cotton design by Chloé to The Fashion Awards, which blurred the line between trench and dress (tress?). Pinched in below my bottom and with a Golden Girls shoulder, it felt fresh and powerful. I’ve been coveting something similar from London brand Goyagoma, as well as Simone Rocha’s sumptuous green taffeta gown. But my favourite “absent- middle-section look” has to be the silk Dior dress that Jonathan Anderson designed for me to wear to Cannes. It seems the only way I can partake in the trend is via pieces that don’t trigger a memory of the Y2K hip-hugging jeans that held us all in a body- conscious chokehold.

Alexa Chung wearing a Dior haute couture dress to the premiere of The Man I Love in Cannes.

Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Getty Images

However, if I take it too far and try the wrong kind of low-waisted denim on the wrong kind of day, I am instantly reminded of my modelling years at the turn of the millennium, all too often spent wondering if my hips were too abundant; if my hip bones were razor-sharp enough? Being sized up regularly by the agency measuring tape did nothing to assuage my fears that my body wasn’t “perfectly proportioned,” and to think of that now makes me sad – that my developing frame was policed and judged. But that attitude was all-pervasive at the time and extended far beyond the rarefied beauty standards within agency walls.

It was incredibly normal for the red-top papers to circle women’s bodies with accusatory yellow pen to highlight these “muffin tops” or those “wobbly bits”. We were encouraged to think Demi Moore must be a medical marvel because she managed to have a banging body at the ripe old age of 40. I suppose it was an attempt to shame us all into growing smaller or disappearing by the time we stopped wanting to have kids? Far from the hedonism or freedom fighting that the low waist signalled in the 1920s, by the time it was regurgitated in the noughties, we may have had the right to vote, but instead of being called a flapper, you’d be called something else beginning with “S”.

This is why I wince slightly when I see Gen Z trotting round Portobello Market in their historically accurate Y2K outfits. It’s sort of like seeing a battle re-enactment in East Sussex. It throws into question how much society has changed since I last wore that trend in the early 2000s. But I really hope that those comely-looking young people are doing what we did with flower crowns circa 2006: blithely pillaging the look from the ’60s without paying too much attention to what the protest banners said. May they live wild and free, oblivious to the olden days when the patriarchy ruled supreme and invented ever more toxic ways to hold us back. Oh wait… To quote my style icon Michael Corleone: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”