So long, skinny jeans! Kelly Ripa revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic (and TikTok!) influenced her to permanently say goodbye to her tight denim.
“I don’t need skinny jeans anymore because my boyfriend jeans now fit like skinny jeans,” the 51-year-old talk show host said on the Wednesday, December 15 episode of Live With Kelly and Ryan. “One of the blessings from Covid.”
Gen Z isn’t the only crew that approves of Ripa’s wardrobe revamp — her husband Mark Consuelos is also all for the closet clean out. “I like your boyfriend jeans,” he joked on the show.
While cleaning out her denim collection was in part due to practicality, watching an excess of TikTok videos also helped convince her that the style had seen better days.
“I finally parted with things that were just a pipe dream,” she recalled. “You know what I mean? Where you’re like, ‘I’m not doing it anymore? This is a thing of the past. This is never going to happen for me again and TikTok says it’s inappropriate for me to wear these things.”
Ditching some of her denim silhouettes wasn’t the only revelation Ripa came to during COVID-19. While Live With Kelly and Ryan was still filming digitally, she realized that she was pretty into shopping in her 20-year-old daughter Lola’s closet.
“I’m now in my daughter’s clothes,” the All My Children star, who was wearing a graphic tee and matching blazer, said during an April episode. “It’s gone there.”
Ripa even took the opportunity to take TikTok beauty trends for a test run, giving heatless curls a go. “My daughter learned how to do my hair using the tie of your bathrobe,” she said at the time. “She watched a TikTok video on how to do hair by wrapping your hair around the bathrobe tie.”
As virtual filming continued well into the summer, Ripa found herself having to get more and more creative without the support of a stylist. In fact, she even ended up fishing around in her swimwear drawer to find something to wear.
“I’m wearing a literal beach cover-up as clothes now,” she told Ryan Seacrest during a June episode. “I just slip that over my nightgown. That’s what I’m doing.” Now, had the soap opera star not drawn attention to her top, it’s possible people would have thought it was just a black and white striped tee.
Ripa’s closet creativity came to a halt when she returned to the studio in September.
