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Even so, many women who can recall the last heyday of low-rise jeans — when zippers regularly measured under three inches and necessitated embracing a peek-a-boo G-string (thus the whale tail trend) or spending a majority of the time hiking jeans up — aren’t excited. “I was in college in the early ‘00s, and I think I still have PTSD from my low-rise Juicy Couture sweats and my two-inch-zipper Diesel and Chip & Pepper jeans,” Pauline Montupet, 39, the founder of San Francisco-based clothing shop Le Point, tells Refinery29. “There was a constant feeling of being too big for low-rise pants,” she explains, adding that her stomach was never flat enough or her hip bones prominent enough, in comparison to celebrities (Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Mischa Barton, etc.) who would frequently wear the trend on the red carpet and at parties. “Only very thin people didn’t have a muffin top while wearing super low-rise jeans, so I constantly felt that I was in a losing battle between my body and low-rise denim.”