I want to go back

And a year later hybrid theory comes out and 11 year old me is convinced there will never be a better album

Raaad!

Hot damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!

I don't know that I'd call them bell-bottoms like the ones in the 70s (with skinny/normal legs, then large at the bottom). Pants in this style in the 90s and early 00s were really baggy all over and frequently dragging on the ground.

bell-bottoms have a come-back in 99

Kind-of. Think Austin Powers, Spice Girls, TLC, Oasis, Doc Martins. The late 90's definitely had some aspects that looked like a cultural revival of the 1960s that came out of slacker/ dropout culture.

Yeah they were huge when I was in school, but I'm pretty sure the first pair are JNCOs

Yes, but we called them "boot flairs."

This is why my pants were wet in the 90s

No, these are not bellbottoms. They're just pants with huge legs, there were shorts like that too. It was a fad in the late 90s

In the late 90's, jeans with gigantic legs were in for both genders, IIRC jeans that were tight/normal down to the knee and then went completely conical down to a huge cuff were called "flares." Or you had the JNCO style 'eight sizes too big" parachute pants look, which was somehow completely separate to the "hammer pants" thing.

The early 2000s had their own take on bell bottoms. Unlike 60's70's bell bottoms which were worn much higher up on the waist, were fairly baggy their entire length with kind of ruffled cuffs worn by both sexes, 21st century bell bottoms were pretty much only a female thing, they were worn much lower at the waist overlapping the "hip hugger" trend, and were worn fairly tight down to lower calf and then had a significantly curved trumpet bell shaped cuff to cover the upper of the shoe but not sweep the floor like 90's parachute pants. Meanwhile guys wore a lot of boot cut carpenter jeans that all had that pointless hammer loop on the left leg.

They did at my school, bell bottoms were huge in 99-2000 but died a quick death around 01.

We never referred to them as bell bottoms but by their brand name; Jncos. And they were rather popular for a subsect of teenage/young adult culture in the late 90s/early 2000s.

It was some point in the 90s. 94-95 maybe. It was brief, because they were, and always had been, a bad idea.

These are not really bellbottoms, the whole leg is big.

I graduated in 2005, and by then bell bottoms on girls were back in fashion; they didn't quite hit the ground, there was just a little bit of the sole of her tennis shoe and a bit of toe visible. I kinda liked that look, then we went with 20 years of "heat shrink that ends an inch above the ankle" for some reason.

Same age. In NYC it was skaters and ravers. I'd imagine any major metro is going to have more counter culture people. Especially back then vs now, when culture didn't have the same Internet pathways to diffuse so quickly geographically.