So I was thinking about how one of the big dividers between decades, especially in the 20th century, has been fashion: poodle skirts in the '50s, long hair and sandals in the 70’s, life preserv— uh, windbreakers in the 80’s, etc. etc.
Then I was thinking of this current decade, and maybe I just have my head in the sand, but I can’t think of any substantial differences between the fashion of this decade and the previous, as though all of the massive change usually reflected in clothes and hair were sucked up into technology. For that matter, and this case may very well be more of a case of bad memory, the differences between 90’s fashions and today’s don’t strike me as all that huge compared to, say, the 80’s and 90’s.
I think we’ll look back on this decade and grimace at the awful “Pixie Cut” plague.
I also see high waisted pants trying to make a comeback, but hopefully it doesn’t catch on. Much like bell bottoms tried and failed to make a comeback in the 00s.
The 90s fashions are jarringly different compared to today. I have a hard time watching anything from the 90s. The hairstyles, the clothes; it’s too 90s.
My nieces and nephews are high school age. I’m starting to see them roll their pant legs like was common around 1990.
shudder
Mostly it seems clothing style has been more subdued the past 15 years ago. Maybe the fashion that sets it apart instead is the prevalence of tattoos and piercings?
Skinny jeans and leggings as pants are defining features right now. A couple years back (the Aughts?) there was a horrible neon-and-grey fad - after a quick Google, this is closest to the type of thing I used to see a lot of. More generally, there’s been a strong tendency towards loose tops and skinny bottoms (example).
Not to mention thick framed glasses. Also, bangs. So many bangs. And they’re not all as flattering as Zooey Deschanel’s. But maybe I just hang out with too many hipsters . . .
I’ve noticed lacy, crocheted ‘bohemian’ dresses and blouses, shawls and scarves. I adore such things, I think they’re timeless, and since I buy my own Christmas presents, maybe pick up a couple of items. I don’t care if in the future they wear skin tight silver jumpsuits with deely-bopper antennas on their heads, I will be in my apricot chiffon and lace blouse with a long velvet skirt…
Between this decade and the 90’s. Yes, it’s huge. It probably helps that I was a kid of the 90’s and most of my employees are teens so it’s right in front of me. The current fashion I see (in girls anyways), is the tight leggings, heavy makeup and often a pretty form fitting top.
I was talking to a similar aged friend and saying that when I was in school, I must have been blind because girls didn’t look like that. She said 'sure we did, but we were just covered up with baggy jeans and over sized sweatshirts". I’m also surprised at how many people will think that the current crop of teens are more like 25 years old, if they don’t know them, mostly due to the makeup I think.
A lot of the “fashion trends” that get associated with particular eras are really just intense but short-lived fads that aren’t actually all that popular among the general public, or popular for very long. For example, we (the general public) tend to associate the 1980s with “Members Only” jackets, enormous shoulder-pads jackets, and BIG hair. But not too many people actually rocked those look in real life. And they were really only popular for a couple of years. By 1987, nobody would be caught dead in a MO jacket or with giant shoulder pads.
Likewise, when we look back at the 1960s, we have a mental image of long-hair scruffy folks wearing tie-dyes. But tie-dyes only really had a heyday of about a year (69/70) - just look at the “Woodstock” documentary, which serves as a veritable ‘warts & all’ time capsule for what was popular in youth culture in 1969. How many tie-dyes do you actually see in it?
Twenty years from now, people will look back at the decade of the “twenty-tens” and will likely think of guys with man-buns, bushy beards and waxed-up, Salvador Dali mustaches. But how many people in your daily life do you actually see with the hipster look?
Differences I’ve noticed, which may or may not have started before 2010 but have really taken off since then:
Tight suits on men, with higher inseams than have been seen since the 1960s
Younger guys rolling up the cuffs of their jeans for a pegged look
High-waisted jeans
Ancient Greek-style sandals that strap up high to the calf
Blue or green hair for young women
The “Old Testament Prophet” beard look on men is definitely new, and I suspect it won’t be around too long. That’s something I didn’t even notice until reading a thread about it on this MB and then… holy shit, they’re everywhere!!!
I don’t know where you live, but I see a shit load of man buns, beards and healthy amount of waxed mustaches (not a lot, but one or two a week). But I’m just about a mile away from my city’s hipster central, so I may have some bias.
But either way, that’s still kind of how fashion trends work. Even though the vast majority of people are still wore ‘normal’ clothes (by just about any standard), it just takes a critical mass of people wearing something novel/different for a few years and we’ll remember it forever.
Forever, the 90’s will be remembered as the grunge era. It was (mostly) just the teens, and even of them, it was just a subset of them. But it was enough people that it was noticed and will forever be remembered and associated with the 90’s. I guess I’m lucky that I was one of those kids that dressed like that (and liked it) so I don’t have to spend the rest of my life being bitter about it and trying to tell people that I wasn’t one of them. Like the 20-30 year olds now that, say, wear a pair of jeans that’s a bit too tight or cut their hair a little differently or listen to a band you’ve probably never heard of and suddenly find themselves saying “I’m not a hipster” 12 times a day.
90s fashion was very distinctive and it did have different phases. All you have to do is watch 90210 to see how it evolved. It went from horrific leftover 80s looks in the first year, flannel shirts/oversized blazers in high school, babydoll dresses/Doc Martens in early college, and skintight Spice Girls’-inspired looks in the late 90s.
Generally I don’t think fashion trends today come and go quite as quickly as they have in previous decades. Certainly skinny jeans have been around for a long time.
As someone who has seen long, free hair on men in the 70’s to this current look of tight haircuts + bushy beards, I have to say: in all eras, Fancy Men will find their way to be Fancy. I appreciate cleaning up nice and having a regard for one’s appearance, but this look is starting to border on steampunk/neo-Americana. Hard not to snerk.
Is it just me, or do the beards in this fashion look easy to detach? Like they hook on to the guy’s ears or something. The contrast with the tight haircuts, and the obvious “I am making a fashion statement” approach to the choice of beard brings that to mind when I see one. Like Kevin Durant wearing thick frames with no lenses to go with his backpack…
Absolutely it has changed from 2005-2015, and not just in the sense of passing trneds.
For women, at least, the basic silhouette has completely inverted. In the 2000’s, we ran bottom heavy, pairing straight leg or bootcut jeans with tightly fitted shirts. Today, it’s completely the opposit, with tight pants or leggings being paired with loosely fitted tops. And it’s impossible to overemphasize the change that leggings have gone through. In the early 2000s they were used in a strictly 1980s sense, as a substitute for tights worn under dresses or in some cases very long sweaters. Within the last decade, they’ve changed to being acceptable items of clothing in their own right, and indeed a basic foundation of many wardrobes.
IMHO, youth fashion is also much more formal these days. In the 2000s, the look was Target-chic, pairing jeans with basic tank tops or henleys. Today, young people look much more put-together, with mroe carefully coordinated outfits and more high-quality pieces. Today’s teens and young adults would look embarassingly mature (as in, old) to the teens and young adults of 2005.
Don’t know how widespread this is but I see it everywhere - uneven length hemlines on jackets, tops and dresses.
They move about between front, back and sides. About ten years ago there was a trend for very elongated points at the sides of lightweight cardigans/overshirts. After that it was all tops with the front hemline around the belly button and the back tailing off at around the butt - very loose fitting. Nowadays I’m seeing the sides go pointy again, but mostly on short sleeved tops and undershirts.
Hard to say. When I see old episodes of Friends, I don’t find the fashion particularly “jarring”. But 90210 I do.
Fashion today is definitely slimmer than in the 90s. I have some shirts left over from college and they are all really baggy. Baggy misshapen clothes are a key indicator of 90s fashion.
Beards, manbuns and other “lumberjacksexual” fashion is also common. In contrast, the “metrosexual” look was common in the 2000s (basically looking like an extra from the Twilight films). In the 90s, people dressed like slobs.
