Every time low-rise comes up, half the replies are people who lived through it the first time having a genuine emotional reaction. Which is fair. But the thing that came back is not the thing that left, and it's worth knowing the difference before deciding.
Twenty years is the cycle
Trends return on roughly a twenty-year lag, and the mechanism is not mysterious: that's how long it takes for something to stop reading as dated and start reading as nostalgic. The people who were children when it was current become the people making and buying clothes, and it comes back looking slightly softened by memory.
Low-rise hit that mark exactly on schedule. So did the flip phone thing, and the digital camera thing, and every other bit of the 2000s currently being sold back to us.
The rise is genuinely higher
Measure a pair of current low-rise jeans against an actual 2002 pair and the difference is usually a couple of inches. What's being sold as low-rise now would have been considered mid-rise then. That's not a criticism, it's just useful to know if you're bracing yourself based on memory.
The fabric also changed. 2000s denim was mostly rigid; almost everything now has elastane in it, which changes how it sits and how forgiving it is over a day.
It's styled the opposite way
The original pairing was low-rise with a crop top, so the exposed section was the entire point. The current styling puts something oversized on top most of the time — a big shirt, a jumper, a jacket — so the proportion reads as relaxed rather than exposed.
And high-rise didn't go anywhere. Both are in shops simultaneously, which genuinely never used to be true, and is a better situation than any single trend winning.
Higher than you remember, stretchier than you remember, styled looser than you remember. Try one pair before deciding.