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Retailers from American Eagle Outfitters to Bloomingdale's are betting that women are ready to shed skinny jeans for a return to flared styles, a change that may firm up more than sagging denim sales.

"The fashion shift is coming," said Christine Chen, an apparel retail analyst at Needham & Co. in San Francisco. "Once the bottom changes, your tops are wrong. It's a whole new reason for the consumer to spend."

Form-hugging denim, around since the middle of the last decade, boosted jeans purchases during the recession with styles like J. Crew's "matchstick." Now the novelty has worn off, with sales of women's premium denim sliding more than 6 percent last year to $1.36 billion, according to Port Washington, N.Y.-based NPD Group.

Upscale department stores like Bloomingdale's aim to buck that trend with designer jeans from J Brand resembling upside down martini glasses for $185. If women buy in, retailers and jean makers such as True Religion Apparel may have just the trend to revive demand in the $13 billion U.S. market, helping to offset price increases spurred by record cotton costs.

"It's been a hit," said Stephanie Solomon, women's fashion director at Bloomingdale's. "We've all been wearing skinnies or jeggings for too long. It's a reason to buy."

Flares have fueled denim sales this spring and are outselling skinny jeans, Solomon said. The style, which showed up on runways last year, has also reached mass-market retailers such as Pittsburgh-based American Eagle, which unveiled a "vintage flare" this spring for $49.50. True Religion, based in Vernon, Calif., offers a dozen flared styles for as much as $319.

Fashion had focused on slimmer shapes since the mid-1990s, when women's magazines began looking more to Kate Moss than Cindy Crawford, said Lourdes Font, a professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Skinnies, leggings and jeggings (leggings that look like jeans) have left designers with nowhere else to go but bigger.

"It's at the very limits of physical reality," Font said. "The only other thing tighter is your own skin."

The flare revival itself could make much of women's old wardrobes obsolete, Chen said, because pants often spur other trends. Flowing tops and shirt-dresses came into being to compensate for the ultra-skinny. Wide legs will usher in an era of shorter and tighter blouses, sweaters and jackets, Chen said.