Well, one 70s fashion that’s popular now is puffer jackets: they look basically, sometimes exactly, the same as the ones we were wearing in the blizzard of '78-'79. Put on some moon boots, and it’s complete.
I don’t think that’s a bad look necessarily, but here are some ones I think have sucked:
Godfuckingawful high-waisted mom jeans. Not all high-waisted jeans are bad–just about 85% of what’s out there now (and women wear them regardless of whether they flatter their body types. Most look terrible).
The clunky 1950s glasses (especially for women), which seemed to peak in 2013 or so. I guess that was awhile ago at this point. Time flies.
Now we have big ol’ ROUND early '90s spectacles. On both women and men. Bad.
I have seen 80s mall hair more than I would care to.
Flannel. Men and women. My ex sent me a picture of my daughter, and she had on a flannel checked shirt. She looked fine, but she could have been straight out of 1995 except for the cell phone in her hand.
I have seen young and otherwise attractive African-American women with what looks like 1930s do-rags or something on… doesn’t match the rest of the outfit and just looks awful.
There’s been “no there there” in fashion since the early 2000s. About the only substantial changes have been skinny jeans and “athleisure.” Certainly not much to celebrate that’s in any way new or exciting. So I guess now, since we want something, anything to take notice of in the world of fashion, we just shit on fashion. Better to look terrible than to carry the utter boredom of the past two decades into the next.
Lest I sound overly negative, I think the reality is that fashion has stabilized around some core looks that are actually good, but the fashion world needs something to sell that’s “new,” and they just have no ideas whatsoever. Hence the retreads.
Nah, just making conversation. I think most people dress fairly normally and acceptably. Ordinarily. I don’t know if that’s good or bad (it could be bad in that fashion is boring and unchanging), but I’m OK with it.
I think it’s the opposite! I think it’s really only attractive people who can rock the high-waisted jeans, and I think non-slim people tend to look bulging in them.
True. It just seems like, a lot of the time, people are going for the retro/retread look without regard to whether it actually looks good on them. I think the big 90s round lenses tend to look bad in general. Uncoolish.
But isn’t that what “retro” means -just old fashions brought to new life? Besides, I never wore flannel EVER. Until a couple of years ago when the son got me some and they were so comfy I haven’t worn anything except flannel since then. In cold weather at least.
and in the arctic regions of the country, the puffy jackets never went out of style … and most of the girls around here still go for the black plastic frame glasses … i think tina fey made those popular again …
I’m confident enough in my middle-aged maleness to leave fashion-leading where it rightly belongs, and that is with the collective mass (and the multitudes contained within) known as as “teenage girls”. It’s their world, after all.
Basically. But sometimes it seems forced, especially when what is brought back to life was never good in the first place and ridiculed in its own time (mom jeans).
I think the larger issue is that fashion right now is one big “retro”: nothing much new since the mid-90s.
Speaking of the mid-90s, I started watching “Home for the Holidays” with Holly Hunter (terrible, soon turned it off), but Holly and her daughter as they looked at the start of the movie could be brought into the year 2019 without anyone noticing.
I too am a Gen Xer and our generation successfully eradicated Mom Jeans. To see these millenials bring them back is totally depressing. My teenage daughter is currently wearing mom jeans and a flannel shirt :mad:
In terms of “real retro,” I would say the Mad Men-inspired menswear trends of 2006 onward is an example, as the designers embraced the aesthetic of a particular time period and worked with it more or less holistically. Labels were skinny, ties were skinny–and pretty much still are, for that matter. All this to me also seemed forced and unoriginal (though not unattractive), but it was definitely “retro.”
I don’t think the mom jeans thing qualifies as there is no thought behind it, and it is bringing back something despised and forgotten with relief at its passing. In contrast, 1960s suits were always celebrated. When three-button suits came back in the 1990s, I had not lived through the 1960s but I saw it at the time as a return to a better style (I was never a fan of 1980s style as I lived through it as a pre-teen and then teen).
I think a good saying to apply here is De gustibus non disputandum est. No accounting for tastes. Perhaps it’s not that those people are following a silly fashion trend; perhaps it’s simply a look they personally like or find comfortable.
I’ve seen all styles of jeans out there and I actually like higher-waisted jeans on a woman. Not saying all should wear those with a particularly high waist (though I’m just now thinking of the curvaceous HR girl at one of the language schools I work at. I have seen her in high-waisted jeans and they set off her butt marvellously). But at least something that falls to your natural waist and is not, like, just two inches above your pubic region. Better IMHO that lots of women wear “mom jeans” than that it be hard to find pants with anything like a proper waist, as it was for much of the “new tens”. Honestly, I don’t like the term “mom jeans” to begin with. First of all, there are good-looking moms out there. Second of all, as I said, tastes differ; why deride the style in this way? Think of attractive early 90s actresses such as Shannen Doherty and how they dressed. I dare anyone go up to one of them and say to her face “You wore mom jeans in the 90s”.
As for big 80s hair, nope, haven’t seen too many examples in my neck of the woods. Although I did recently see a woman with an archetypal 80s glam hairstyle (longish in the back but feathered and spiked all over, essentially a stylist’s lady mullet. Think Olivia Newton-John in her “Physical” era). The thing being that she looked somewhat too young to have sported such a look back in the 80s. But that is good in my book, because it suggests to me that she’s an original who is not afraid to rock her own style, no matter what people may think.
And this brings me to my main point. I think it’s good that we appear to live in an era where fashion is not followed strictly. Styles seem to have progressively been becoming less era-specific since about the 1980s, and this seems to be the first decade where there really are no prevailing fashion trends to speak of. Some trends do come and go (for example, I think they revived 90s-style spaghetti strap dresses and button-fronted miniskirts this year), but seem to be more subtly introduced than in previous decades and not to push out other styles the way they did in the past. Perhaps no new ideas are coming up because they’ve tried everything. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly think there’s nothing wrong with fashion in the sense of merely putting something new on the market. The problem is when conformity to fashion trends is fostered and adhered to. I.E. when the styles available to you are limited by the fashion industry, when people are mocked for being out of style, when having your own look is looked upon as eccentric, when people feel the need to conform. Think of how things were as recently as the last decade. Though the styles of the “new tens” are harder to define relative to the styles of e.g. the 60s, 70s, or even the 80s, there are definitely some trends that very much prevailed. In my entirely subjective opinion, the “noughties” were a rather counter-aesthetic period compared to both the decades between which they were sandwiched. The same basic kinds of clothes as in the decade before and the decade after, but with a rough edge seemingly added to everything. Especially women could hardly get pants falling anywhere near their natural waist. Asymmetric skirts, tees/sweats with patches sewn onto them, hair at all costs layered in at least some places…of course, there are those who like these looks and still wear them today. No problem. But I think it’s good that today there is more variety and you can pick and choose more easily depending on your preferences. One standard aesthetic no longer seems to be pushed on people. What if, circa 2006, I was a woman wanting pants and shirts that could fully cover my midriff. Why should it have been difficult for me to get them?
The impression I get is that today, it is much easier than in the past to get clothes in different styles than it was in the past. Rather than it being just one big “retro”, it’s more of a situation where different shops sell different products and people can get what they want, as per their preference. You can get skinny jeans, low-waisted jeans, high-waisted jeans, jeans in different colors. Some shops specialize in retro: 60s-inspired clothes at Haight Ashbury, for example. Others just provide a selection of various basic styles, e.g. C&A. My style is neutral casuals that fit and cover me properly. You may like something completely different. I’m glad I can go somewhere where I can find what I want. I hope things stay this way. I take it as a sign of progress that people can essentially look the way they want without being pushed to conform to specific trends. Going back to a tendency to limit people to this season’s or decade’s specific style and to dismiss those who don’t wish to follow those trends as outdated and unfashionable would IMO be a regression on the part of society. I hope it won’t happen.
Uh yeah, I was baffled by the thread title,* the retros aren[t retro they’re just retro*. I don’t wear fashion anyway, but I have had a couple of plaid flannel shirts and worn them occasionally, but flannel isn’t retro, it’s never gone away anywhere to come back from.
I was in a J Crew store the other day and I was surprised that they were selling what I largely considered to be esoteric quasi-outdoor working class 90s fashion popularized by LL Bean, Land’s End, Abercrombie & Fitch, Eddie Bauer and of course J Crew. Things like “roll neck sweaters”, woven sweaters with extra material at the neck and arms that would “roll”, but not enough to be a proper turtleneck. Or “barn jackets” - typically green or tan canvas 3/4 length coat with a distinctive corduroy collar.
Stuff that looks like what a farmer, construction worker or fisherman might wear on the job if he had $300 to spend on a jacket or sweater.
What makes jeans “mom jeans” is that someone did put some thought into it back in the 80s. And that thought was "blue jeans would look a lot cooler if we made them baggy with high waists, pleats, sequins, and then acid washed them. Like most things, they did look ok on an attractive 16 year old girl. If said girl continues to wear that same style for the next 20 years, she then stands out as a middle-aged woman wearing ill-fitting jeans that are a product of a different period in history.
If hair trends count as fashion, I don’t recall a prior time where girls were coloring their hair with such crazy colors (hot pink, blue, lime green) as today. Punk rock styles had a bit of this, but it was more about the spikey or shaved heads or mohawks than the colors.