Search interest in JNCO jorts is up 495 percent on Depop, according to WWD’s reporting on the resale platform’s 2026 trend data. Bandage dresses are climbing even faster on the same site, up 542 percent. Depop groups both under a category it’s calling “Neo Nostalgia” in its own “The Edited Self” trend report, which describes shoppers “blending fragments” of the 1970s, 90s, and early 2000s into outfits that don’t belong cleanly to any one decade. Coming from a marketing deck, a number like that would be easy to shrug off. Coming from a marketplace’s own internal search logs, it reads less like a prediction and more like a receipt.

The Data Behind “Neo Nostalgia”

The jorts spike isn’t an isolated blip in Depop’s numbers. The same trend data shows vintage Lululemon searches up 1,689 percent, Napoleon-style jackets up 1,202 percent, and medieval-inspired references up 240 percent — a strange, decade-spanning grab bag that Who What Wear’s coverage of the report connects to renewed interest in archival-era labels like Von Dutch, Ed Hardy, Emilio Pucci, and Roberto Cavalli. “Neo Nostalgia” is just one of four categories in Depop’s report, alongside sections the company calls Modern Uniforms, Everyday Ceremony, and Romanticized Sports, but it’s the one built almost entirely out of items that were already unfashionable once and are now unfashionable a second, more deliberate time. Depop’s own report frames the pattern as more psychological than aesthetic, arguing shoppers are reaching for old silhouettes because, as it puts it, “nostalgia becomes a grounding mechanism” when the present feels unsettled. It’s a tidy theory for a shopping trend. It also happens to describe almost exactly what happened to JNCO the first time around.

Sixty-Inch Flares and a Very 90s Peak

JNCO didn’t invent the baggy-jean silhouette, but it pushed it further than almost any brand before or since. The Los Angeles label launched in 1985 and became a fixture of skate parks, mall food courts, and mid-90s teen style, according to CNN’s account of the brand’s history. At the extreme end, JNCO’s flares measured up to 60 inches around the leg opening — wide enough to swallow a skateboard, and wide enough that the brand became a punchline nearly as often as it was a status symbol. Production wound down through the 2000s as the look aged out of fashion, though the company never technically shut its doors; it just stopped being anyone’s idea of cool.

A Comeback JNCO Already Tried Once

This isn’t even the brand’s first attempted revival. Back in 2015, WWD reported that a U.S. division of the Chinese conglomerate Jiangsu Guotai International Group had picked up the rights to relaunch JNCO, debuting a new lineup at the Liberty Fairs trade show in Las Vegas. That collection split into three tiers: a slouchy-fit core line, a fashion line built around zip-bottom joggers, and a “heritage” line with leg openings scaled back to 20 to 23 inches — dramatically narrower than the original 90s extremes, but still unmistakably JNCO. The executive running sales and marketing for that relaunch had worked for the original company back in the 90s, which made the whole thing feel less like an outsider’s cash grab and more like a reunion tour.

What’s Actually For Sale Right Now

Today, JNCO’s own site sells a modernized version of that heritage idea: styles like the Big Rig (26-inch leg opening) and the Wide Load (30 inches) run $140 to $220 a pair, and as of this writing, most sizes and colorways are listed as sold out. But that’s not what’s driving the number in Depop’s report. The spike WWD flagged is specifically in jorts — denim shorts — a category the current retail lineup doesn’t emphasize at all. Which means the 495 percent isn’t shoppers hunting for the new stuff. It’s shoppers hunting for old stuff: actual secondhand pairs from JNCO’s first run, the ones nobody’s making anymore.

The Pattern

None of this is really a story about one denim brand. It’s a live look at what a resale marketplace’s own search bar does when enough of its users start reaching backward at once — not toward one specific decade, but toward whichever fragments of the past feel most wearable right now. JNCO has already lived through one full cycle of flameout and relaunch, and its search numbers on Depop suggest it’s mid-swing on a second one, driven this time not by a company’s marketing budget but by shoppers quietly typing “jorts” into a resale app’s search bar.