277% Sales Jump: The Underwear Trend Jennie and IVE Are Behind

BLACKPINK's Jennie and IVE's Jang Wonyoung have both been spotted wearing their waistbands deliberately above their jeans, and the underwear industry has noticed. FILA's Lovers line, sold through Mistoko Korea, crossed 100,000 cumulative units sold and posted 277% year-on-year growth as of data released on July 8, with the brand attributing the spike directly to social media coverage pairing the line with sagging looks.

The styling move itself is straightforward: waist of the trousers dropped below the hip, waistband or logo of the underwear showing above. What has changed recently, according to AP reporting, is the degree. Where older sagging looks typically exposed just the band or a few centimeters of fabric, some current iterations pull the pants low enough to reveal a substantial portion of the seat. It is a significant escalation of the original silhouette.

From 1990s hip-hop to 2026 K-pop

Sagging has a clear lineage. It spread through American hip-hop in the 1990s, associated with artists including Tupac and Snoop Dogg, and reached a broader pop audience when Justin Bieber wore the style in the early 2010s. The difference now is who is wearing it and how deliberately it is being framed.

Jennie and Jang Wonyoung are treating the underwear as a visible garment rather than a hidden one, which is the key conceptual shift. Martin of the group Cortis has also drawn attention for the same approach. Underwear as accessory is not a new idea, but having artists with the visibility of BLACKPINK and IVE adopt it consistently moves it from a styling experiment into something closer to a trend.

Rapper Kim Ha-on carried the look further when he appeared on EXO Kai's YouTube show Jeonggwaja wearing his jeans dropped low enough to expose roughly half of his seat. Kai, watching him walk in, reportedly said: "Do you really have to wear them that low?" Kim Ha-on has worn similar looks at several festival performances.

What the retail numbers say

Fashion platform Musinsa flagged sagging as one of the defining keywords in its 2025 trend wrap-up report, published last year. That the trend is showing up in annual retail analysis, not just editorial coverage, is the clearest sign it has moved beyond street styling into something the industry is actively tracking.

The broader argument the numbers make is simple: underwear is functioning as outerwear detail. When a waistband becomes a styling element with brand visibility, it changes which products sell and why. FILA's Lovers line did not grow 277% because the construction changed. It grew because the way people are wearing trousers changed around it.