OPINION: I’ve got a few skeletons in my closet: baggy jeans a-la The Stone Roses, a paisley shirt circa 1993, a pair of mesh gloves bought in honour of Madonna.
You know what’s not in there, though? Clothes from the noughts. No ultra-low rise jeans, denim blazers or asymmetrical dresses made of cheap T-shirt material. No denim pedal pushers, ruched cotton tops, or belt buckles that scream GLAM or GLITTER, in diamante hysterics. No Juicy Couture velour in my wardrobe, so help me God.
The 00s were a lot of things, but from a distance of 20-odd years I can safely say, stylish wasn’t one of them.
So it shook me to my core, gentle reader, to see folks reckoning the 00s are coming back; rising from fashion purgatory like some eldritch, many-tentacled, Ed Hardy-shirt wearing horror.
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“So much fashion of that decade made absolutely no sense,” writes Jenna Guillaume in BuzzFeed, that herald of cultural doom. “It also looked good on very few people – those who were thin and basically no-one else. There’s a reason so many of us are still traumatised.” Preach it, sister.
It’s weird the tricks your mind plays on you when you get nostalgic about fashion. I was in my prime during the 00s, a newly single gal about London, so I must have been interested in clothes, I must have bought them, right? But it wasn’t until I read that nightmarish BuzzFeed article that I remembered micro mini skirts with knee-high furry leg warmers were a thing. I mean, I’d heard that your mind will block out traumatic experiences, but that seems a little extreme – or should I say X-TREEM, as in big blingin’ gothic font down the leg of some adidas-style track pants?
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Kylie Klein Nixon does not want to go back to the 00s.
My mind – aware of the trauma of trying to wear ultra-low rise jeans and not look like gaffer tape wrapped around an egg – had completely blocked those out too. Gone was the memory of every pair of jeans sitting precariously on your pubic bone, so you were never less than one frantic dash across the road away from flashing your whole entire moneymaker region at the world.
Jeans were so low, fashionistas were forced to make showing your gruts part of the look. Thong peep was everywhere, hungry-bum syndrome was couture. Tell me that’s not completely messed up.
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Things made just to be peeped? Whose idea was this?
I don’t want to wear jeans that leave half my butt exposed. I don’t want to wear a tacky mix of streetwear and glam so racy your undies have to be outies. Sure, we just did the 90s all over again, revisiting when grunge made baby doll nighties and satin slips mainstream, but the 90s were about rebelling against fashion norms and making ends meet as a poor student. The 90s were also super, super cute. The 00s, by contrast, were all about how incredibly rich, nasty and thin Paris Hilton was. By the 00s, silky, lace-trimmed camisoles, and short, fluffy cardigans, over bootcut jeans and kitten heel pumps became the “fashionable gal” uniform.
But mostly, when I think of 00s and fashion, I think of discomfort. I think of walking in and out of the stores along Oxford St, finding nothing that fits, or even in my size, nothing that wasn’t too clingy, too short or too trashy, nothing that didn’t make me feel ashamed of how I looked, a grown-ass woman with an average-to-plump body.
I think of Primark, where 20 quid could buy you an entire ill-fitting wardrobe… and every stitch of it hand made by children working under terrible conditions, and dying under them too. I think of mountains of fast fashion clogging up land fill, of toxic inks and dyes polluting streams, rivers and ground water. I think of people getting lung disease from fabric fibres, the result of artificially distressing denim for rich Westerners who’ll never work hard enough a day in their lives to distress denim naturally.
Haven’t we got past all that horror? Why would we want to re-run the dawn of fast fashion? Ditto to trying to squeeze average female bodies into clothes designed for 10-year-olds. The 00s were the age of size 00, and I’ll be damned if I sit idle through another trend where starving yourself till you’re emaciated is the only way to look good in it. Our daughters deserve better than that.
I’ve written before about how a mania for disposable clothing and keeping up with the Hiltons, Kardashians or whomever is conspicuously consuming fashion this week, is a curse the world can’t afford to ignore any more.
Perhaps the lumbering corpse of 00s fashion – midrift bare, baguette bag clutched to its visible ribs as it screeches along to Hollaback Girl and tries, inconspicuously, to pluck the lace thong from its boney butt – lunging at you from the fashion pages, will finally convince you to try.
