When low-rise jeans started creeping their way back into street style at the start of the decade, people sort of flipped out en masse. Vogue’s Molly Jong-Fast described the jeans as “one of the worst trends of my lifetime,” while Vox’s Rebecca Jennings wrote that millennials were “terrified” of their return. Personally, I was not terrified. I was actually very on board. Slipping them on felt like being reunited with some old friends. Why wasn’t I wearing low-rise all along? I’d been bamboozled into restricting myself.
Low-rise jeans aren’t the only Y2K trend I’ve felt an affinity with the second time around (PSA: I was born in the ’90s). I purchased a parka recently, the type with a huge big fluffy hood, not dissimilar to what I used to wear to school, and felt truly in my element. Skirts over trousers? Love them; the perfect mixture of femme and boyish. Bootcut jeans? Inject them into my veins. The only Noughties trend I won’t be partaking in is preppy uni fashion, which was extremely loserish the first time. And thankfully we’ve not yet entered a jeggings era, which I’ll also be skipping for reasons I hope I don’t have to explain.
I can see why Y2K trends might be a source of existential angst for a lot of people. Aside from the obvious (it makes you feel ancient, like an old wizened artefact), the clothes themselves now exist in a slightly different context, with different style cues. When I was a kid, for example, Juicy Couture and Ugg boots were the epitome of basic. Now, the combo is considered cute and playful, with more than a heavy dose of irony. So for many, I think, it’s the contextual shift that can make certain trends hard to get behind. The same goes for a lot of Y2K garms: puffball skirts, plastic pearls, skinny jeans… Why would you wear a trend this time around if you hated it the first?
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