When Lainey Wilson was only a “little girl,” she slipped into her first pair of bell-bottoms. Then, strangely during the year of jeggings, the super-flared trousers reappeared in her wardrobe once she relocated to Nashville in 2011. This time for good.
She says, the rest is history.
“A few years in [to her music career] I discovered really fast that as a respectable female singer-songwriter, that’s not enough. She tells people, “I needed to do something that made me stand out and stand apart,” regarding her jewelry project with Kendra Scott.
She pledged then to wear bell-bottoms “every single day,” which she intends to keep on doing for life, even in her old age (“I’ll probably be 90 years old and still wearing bell-bottoms — I don’t think anyone’s ever seen my ankles!” she joked in her summer 2023 people StyleWatch cover story).
The country star and Yellowstone actress has evolved over the years in terms of bell-bottom styling.
She has experimented with practically every style under the sun, blinged-out, splashed in patterns, created from leather, fitted into a custom suit. She even donned a rhinestone pair when cosplaying Hannah Montana—a gig she used to do before her major break—honoring Miley Cyrus’s Disney Legend honor on Aug. 11.
She throws on her preferred jeans, even though she knows she would get some unwelcome comments. “What can I do that still is true to me, that makes me feel like I can really do anything and walk somewhere with confidence?” she asks.
“Occasional times saw folks staring at me insane, wondering, ‘What in the world are you doing? You seem to have emerged from the ’70s. Still, I continued because I believed in it. Eventually, I thought, if you toss something against the wall long enough it would stick.
“Who knows? Ultimately, I’m not going to say that I’m not going to wear anything.” Wilson answers when asked whether she would never try looking for something. “Many people have never seen me in a dress,” she notes.
One exception is there, though. Wilson, who actually used to wear fitting pants “a lot” before she converted them into flares in typical Lainey flair, says, “You ain’t going to see me in skinny jeans.”