Hailey Bieber Woke Up And Chose Skintight Flares For 2026

It’s no bad thing that Hailey Bieber decided to wear a pair of flared trousers for her first street-style outing of 2026, but it was a choice. The model-turned-mogul, who spent the dying months of 2025 stuck in mum-jean purgatory – loose-cut vintage Levi’s 501s and Gap’s 90s Loose Jeans – was photographed yesterday leaving the Anastasia Beverly Hills spa in Saint Laurent glasses, a fuzzy cocoon-sleeve coat and Jimmy Choo-skimming bell-bottoms. (Possibly the same Prada needlecords she scored at Found and Vision on her last London trip, and wore for her birthday in November.)

Backgrid UK

Flares, depending on your personal tolerance for 1970s bohemianism, have been staging a low-grade comeback for some time. Across the autumn/winter 2025 shows, the silhouette was made cosmopolitan, even rakish, as designers from Aaron Esh, Erdem, McQueen and Johanna Parv sent hem-exploding cuts down the runway. All of which feels bound up with a broader appetite for looking a little more dressed. “Polish is making a return to our trouser choices in 2026,” as Vogue’s shopping editor Joy Montgomery not long ago wrote, noting that the post-pandemic reliance on forgiving waistbands and utilitarian cuts is fading. The new attitude, she duly argued, is “high-maintenance”.

Which is precisely what Bieber was giving off as she slipped out through the staff entrance of that Rodeo Drive salon and into a storm of paparazzi flashbulbs: hair pulled tight enough to tug her forehead back in time, manicured fingers closing around the clutch of a karakul jacket that looked as though it might have been acquired at an Upper East Side estate sale (but was, in fact, from Rig Vert Vintage), excess trouser hems bouncing with every heel clack, an SUV already blinking at the kerb. Yes, flares may once have served as a symbol of soil-under-the-toe-nails counterculture, but is Bieber’s not a more enticing way to live in 2026?