26 Brands Like Buckle for Denim and Casual Wear
You go into Buckle for one pair of jeans and leave having spent a lot more than you meant to. Its own women's jeans page runs from $76.99 to $258, because half that rack is 7 For All Mankind and True Religion rather than the house label. Good denim, priced like good denim, which is a problem when you wanted a Saturday pair.
Here are 26 places to look instead, and one thing worth settling first. Buckle is a shop rather than a label. Its women's jeans page stocks BKE and Buckle Black, its two in-house lines, beside Levi's, Free People, Miss Me, Ed Hardy, HIDDEN, VERVET by Flying Monkey and Kimes Ranch. Five picks below work the same way, with a wall of other people's brands. The other 21 are labels, where one design team sets the fit and it holds from season to season.
Every price below comes in US dollars, quoted at full list rather than the sale sticker. Where a site blocked our check, the section says so and gives a tier instead of a number we can't stand behind.
Quick comparison: the table splits all 26 into shop or label, with the price we could read on the day.
| Brand | Type | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| American Eagle Outfitters | Label | Site blocked our check | Denim in a long size run |
| Hollister | Label | Site blocked our check | Beach-leaning casual basics |
| Aeropostale | Label | Budget | Graphic tees on a tight budget |
| PacSun | Shop | Women's jeans $59.95 to $69.95 | California denim plus house labels |
| Urban Outfitters | Shop | Mid-range | A 935-brand wall |
| Forever 21 | Label | Denim $29.99 to $54.99 | Trend denim under $55 |
| Zara | Label | Site blocked our check | Runway shapes at mall speed |
| Tilly's | Shop | Budget | Skate and surf labels in one basket |
| Guess | Label | Mid-range | Logo denim with a going-out finish |
| Express | Label | Mid-range | Jeans that pass at the office |
| H&M | Label | Budget | Cheap trend pieces in volume |
| Old Navy | Label | Budget | Family denim and everyday basics |
| Madewell | Label | Mid-range | Denim you keep for years |
| Aritzia | Label | Mid-range | Polished in-house lines |
| Garage | Label | Budget | Young women's trend basics |
| Zumiez | Shop | Women's jeans $64.94 to $69.94 | Skate brands under one roof |
| Uniqlo | Label | Baggy Straight Jeans $59.90 | Plain denim that fits |
| Bershka | Label | Site blocked our check | Loud, cheap, European |
| Cotton On | Label | Budget | Easy Australian basics |
| Pull & Bear | Label | Site blocked our check | Oversized European streetwear |
| Abercrombie & Fitch | Label | Mid-range | Grown-up denim and dresses |
| Lulus | Label | Mid-range | An outfit for the event |
| Dolls Kill | Shop | Jeans $79 to $119 | Alternative denim with hardware |
| Shein | Label | Budget | Volume at the lowest price |
| Nasty Gal | Label | Mid-range | Party clothes with attitude |
| Brandy Melville | Label | Tops $18 to $23 | One-size Californian basics |
American Eagle Outfitters
American Eagle Outfitters is the closest thing on this list to Buckle's denim wall run as a single label, with jeans and loungewear made in-house alongside its Aerie line. One design team owns the fit, so a size that works in a mom jean tends to work in the next cut too.
We couldn't read a price. ae.com returns an Access Denied page to every check we ran, and the product pages render their prices in the browser rather than the markup, so there's no figure here we'd be willing to print.
Best for: sticking with one denim fit across several washes.
Shop American Eagle Outfitters Now
Hollister
Hollister sells surf-leaning casual clothing at hollisterco.com, and the domain matters here. Plain hollisterco.com belongs to Hollister Incorporated, an Ohio medical device maker selling ostomy and continence products, so a shopper who guesses the shorter address lands somewhere with no clothes in it.
The TLS certificate on hollisterco.com is issued to Abercrombie & Fitch Co. of New Albany, Ohio, and covers abercrombiekids.com and gillyhicks.com too, which puts Hollister and Abercrombie in the same house. Akamai blocks our price checks on both.
Best for: the softer, beachier end of the same wardrobe Abercrombie sells.
Aeropostale
Aeropostale is the budget end of American teen casualwear, built on graphic tees and hoodies rather than anything Western. Supabase has it filed as budget, and the store's own banners lead with promotions like buy one get two free on tees.
The site runs on Salesforce Commerce Cloud behind Akamai. Both its category JSON and its product feed return Access Denied, and the readable page text carried only shipping thresholds, so we've left the price as a tier.
Best for: replacing a drawer of tees without thinking hard about it.
PacSun
PacSun works the way Buckle does. It stocks its own John Galt line beside Levi's and Vans, so you're shopping a brand wall rather than one house fit.
Women's jeans list at $59.95 to $69.95, which undercuts Buckle's $76.99 floor by a useful margin. A sitewide denim promotion was running when we checked, dropping the same jeans to $29 to $49, and the struck-through figures on the page are what those pairs cost when the event ends.
Best for: California denim at roughly two thirds of Buckle's entry price.
Urban Outfitters
Urban Outfitters lists 935 brands on its own brand directory, with adidas and Anna Sui among them, which makes it the widest shop here by some distance. Its house denim line, BDG, sits on the same racks as the outside labels.
The catalogue reaches past clothing into records and furniture, so it's a browsing shop rather than a denim errand. If you want the same eclectic mix from independent designers, our roundup of Black-owned brands like Urban Outfitters covers 17 of them.
Best for: finding a label you hadn't heard of last week.
Forever 21
Forever 21 is readable, which makes it one of the few honest price comparisons on this page. Its denim runs $29.99 for a mini skirt, $34.99 for Bermuda shorts, $49.99 for a washed trucker jacket and $54.99 for polka dot wide-leg jeans, all at full list with no markdown attached.
The catalogue leans hard on tops, with 136 of the first 250 listings in that one category against 52 bottoms. About 65% of variants were in stock. Its wide-leg jeans cost less than half Buckle's cheapest pair.
Best for: trying a denim shape you're not sure about yet.
Zara
Zara turns runway shapes into shop-floor clothes faster than anyone on this list, and its cuts run sharper and more European than Buckle's Western-inflected denim. Tailoring and outerwear carry the range as much as the jeans do.
Reading a price is another matter. zara.com returns a 2.1 KB page with a blank title to every request we made, an Inditex interstitial we also hit on Bershka and Pull & Bear. No figure is readable through it, so we haven't guessed one.
Best for: a going-out outfit that doesn't read as mall.
Tilly's
Tilly's is the shop-for-shop swap if what you like about Buckle is the brand wall itself. Its women's jeans page carries RSQ and Full Tilt, its own labels, next to Billabong, Dickies, Vans, BDG, Levi's and Santa Cruz.
The lean is skate and surf rather than Western, and Supabase files it as budget. Cloudflare blocks direct reads, and the prices visible through a text proxy mixed list figures with clearance, so the tier is the honest answer.
Best for: shopping six action-sports labels in one basket.
Guess
Guess makes the glossiest denim here. The triangle logo, the high shine and the going-out cuts sit a step above Buckle's everyday jeans without reaching designer money, and Supabase files it as mid-range.
The US site loaded for us at guess.com/en-us but its denim category returned a 404, and the pages that did load carried no readable prices. The homepage was running a sale banner at the time, which is another reason a scraped figure would have misled you.
Best for: jeans you'd wear to dinner rather than to the barn.
Express
Express aims at the part of your week Buckle doesn't dress. Its denim is cut clean enough for an office that tolerates jeans, and the range extends into suiting and shirting rather than graphic tees.
Supabase files it as mid-range. express.com returns Access Denied to direct requests, and a text proxy served us a page whose title belonged to the dresses section rather than the jeans one, so nothing on it was safe to quote.
Best for: one pair of jeans that works Monday and Saturday.
H&M
H&M covers the same trends as Buckle at a fraction of the outlay, with a catalogue that turns over fast and stretches from plain basics into designer collaborations. Supabase files it as budget, and it's the largest of the budget names here by store count.
Its US site returns Access Denied to every request we made, so there's no price in this section. What we can say is that its denim sits far under Buckle's $76.99 floor.
Best for: a trend you want to try once and might not keep.
Old Navy
Old Navy is the value end of Gap Inc. and the broadest fit range in this group, running women's, men's, kids' and baby from one denim programme. Supabase files it as budget.
The homepage loads at oldnavy.gap.com, but its category pages build their prices in the browser and the only figures in the markup were promotional. We've kept the tier rather than print a sock price as if it were a jeans price.
Best for: kitting out more than one person in the same trip.
Madewell
Madewell is the denim specialist on this list, and the closest match in spirit to what Buckle's better jeans are trying to be. The cuts are vintage-leaning, the washes are quieter and the fabric is heavier than most of the budget names here.
Supabase files it as mid-range. The site returns Access Denied and its product pages render in the browser, so we couldn't confirm a figure today. Our guide to brands like Madewell for men covers the same territory on the menswear side.
Best for: one pair you'll still be wearing in three years.
Aritzia
Aritzia runs its own family of in-house lines rather than a brand wall, which is why it reads as one coherent shop despite the variety. The Canadian retailer sits at the polished end of this list, closer to workwear-adjacent tailoring than to Western denim.
Supabase files it as mid-range, above most of the budget names here and roughly level with Buckle's own jeans. Cloudflare's challenge page blocked every read we attempted, so there's no price in this section.
Best for: casual clothes that don't look casual.
Garage
Garage is the Canadian sister label to Dynamite, aimed at teens and young women, and it lands well under Buckle on price. Supabase files it as budget.
Use garageclothing.com. The older garageclothing.com address that circulates in listicles returns a bare Apache page titled with the domain itself, which is a placeholder rather than a shop. The real site sits behind Akamai and blocked our price reads.
Best for: baggy jeans and crop tops without a big outlay.
Zumiez
Zumiez is a shop like Buckle, swapping the Western lean for skate and snow. Its women's jeans sat at $64.94 to $69.94 when we checked, which puts its denim floor about $12 under Buckle's.
The women's denim page leans on Empyre, the house label, though the wider store carries hardware and outside brands that Buckle has no equivalent of. We go through the rest of that field in our list of brands like Zumiez.
Best for: baggy denim plus a deck in the same order.
Uniqlo
Uniqlo is the plainest label here and the easiest price to verify. The men's Baggy Straight Jeans cost $59.90 and a PEANUTS UT graphic tee $29.90, both full price with no promotion attached.
Nothing in the range chases a trend, which is the point. The denim comes in a small number of cuts and a lot of sizes, and the tees carry licensed graphics rather than house logos. That $59.90 sits $17 under the floor of Buckle's women's denim page.
Best for: denim you buy without reading a description.
Bershka
Bershka is Inditex's loudest label, aimed younger and cheaper than Zara, with colour and graphics doing most of the work. Supabase files it as budget.
bershka.com served us the same 2.1 KB blank-titled interstitial that Zara and Pull & Bear did, so no price on the site was readable from here. The three share an owner, which is worth knowing before you treat them as three separate opinions.
Best for: a going-out top you won't mind losing.
Cotton On
Cotton On is the Australian entry, and its US storefront sits at cottonon.com/US. The range is comfort-led basics, tees, fleece and easy denim, with Supabase filing it as budget.
Its pages carry price data in nine currencies at once, including AUD, GBP, SGD and NZD, which is exactly the setup that produces a wrong number if you scrape it. We saw a $35.00 figure on the US jeans page and haven't printed it as a range for that reason.
Best for: restocking tees and sweats in one go.
Pull & Bear
Pull & Bear cuts everything a size looser than the American labels here, which is the whole appeal. Oversized tees and wide denim, aimed at a European teen and twenty-something shopper.
pullandbear.com returned the Inditex interstitial to us as well, so the price stays a tier. We've written up the wider field in our guide to brands like Pull and Bear if you want the alternatives rather than the source.
Best for: the loose European silhouette Buckle doesn't do.
Abercrombie & Fitch
Abercrombie & Fitch now sells to the shopper Buckle loses at about 25, with denim and dresses in place of the logo hoodies it built its name on. Supabase files it as mid-range, which puts it near Buckle's own price band.
Its fit system is the reason people stay, and we've compared two of the options in Curve Love vs Regular. Akamai blocked our reads on abercrombie.com, so no figure appears here.
Best for: denim you'd wear to a wedding weekend.
Lulus
Lulus is the occasion-wear pick, built around dresses for weddings and parties, with casual separates filling in around them. It's the least denim-led name on this page, and it's here for the days Buckle can't dress.
Supabase files it as mid-range. lulus.com returns an Access Denied page to direct requests and its product feed is closed, so we haven't quoted a price.
Best for: one dress for an event on the calendar.
Dolls Kill
Dolls Kill runs a brand wall like Buckle does, except the labels on it are mostly its own. Its jeans page carries Current Mood, Sugar Thrillz, Generation Kiss and dELiA*s by Dolls Kill, at $79 to $119 in USD and at full price.
Stock is healthy, with 1,827 of 1,846 variants available in our sample. The catalogue was heavily weighted to costumes on the day we looked, at 126 of the first 250 listings, so the everyday clothing takes a little digging.
Best for: patchwork and cargo denim with hardware on it.
Shein
Shein is the cheapest name here by a wide margin and the furthest from Buckle in how it operates, selling online only with a catalogue that changes daily. Supabase files it as budget.
Its prices are built in the browser with no structured data behind them, so nothing on the site was readable to us. Before you order, our roundup of brands like Shein flags which of its apparent rivals are the same company under another name.
Best for: the lowest price on a trend piece, with the wait that implies.
Nasty Gal
Nasty Gal sells party clothes with a rock-leaning edge, faux leather and slip dresses, at a mid-range tier in Supabase. It's the moodiest wardrobe on this list.
Read the label on each listing before you order. The site preloads media from Debenhams Group hosts, and its listings have carried sister-label stock from Boohoo and PrettyLittleThing alongside its own, so a price on one page won't predict the price on the next.
Best for: a going-out outfit with attitude built in.
Brandy Melville
Brandy Melville is the cheapest verified label on this page. Tops run $18 to $23, sweaters $38, the Hilary Yoga Pants $35 and the Malia Mini Denim Skirt $35, all in USD at full price with no markdowns in our sample.
The catch is sizing. Most of the range is cut one-size, so the fit works for a narrow band of bodies and there's no size run to fall back on. Its 250-listing sample held one denim item, so this isn't a jeans destination.
Best for: soft basics and knitwear at Aeropostale money.
How to Pick Between a Shop and a Label
The choice underneath all 26 is the one Buckle already made for you. A shop hands you a wall of labels and lets you compare five brands of jean in one changing room, which is how PacSun, Urban Outfitters, Tilly's, Zumiez and Dolls Kill work. A label hands you one design team, so once you find your cut you can reorder it in a different wash without re-learning the sizing.
On price, three read cleanly under Buckle's $76.99 entry: Forever 21's wide-leg jeans at $54.99, Uniqlo's baggy straight at $59.90 and PacSun's denim list from $59.95, and only the last of those keeps a multi-brand rack. If what you want is Buckle's denim quality without Buckle's checkout, Madewell is the one to start with. Our full article archive has more where this came from.
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Written by
Spencer Lanoue
