When Tora Northman, 23, scrolls through Instagram, as
she does multiple times a day, she often sees a picture of
Gwyneth Paltrow
attending the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards in a burgundy velvet Gucci trouser
suit in her feed. Sometimes a friend will have posted it. Other times, it has
come from one of the 1990s- and Y2K-themed pages that have proliferated online,
including @early2000sbabes, @90sanxiety, @90smilk and @literally.iconic, the
owner of which claims, in the account’s bio, to have been “raised by paris and
britney.”
اضافة اعلان
“Every single time I see her in that red velvet suit, I will
‘like’ it, and I will probably share it,” Northman said.
Gen Z’s style obsession with the 1990s and ’00s is well
documented. See
Olivia Rodrigo at the White House in a “Clueless”-esque Chanel
suit from 1995, or
Bella Hadid celebrating her birthday in the opening look
from Gucci’s spring 1998 collection. Survey a gaggle of teenagers and you’ll
spot “vintage” camo trousers, platform shoes, strappy tops, belly chains,
slogan T-shirts (“Boys Lie!”), hibiscus-print dresses and butterfly jewelry.
On the resale platform Depop, there were 290,000 unique searches
for “Y2K” in September, October and November, according to the company. (It is
one of the most popular searches on the platform, a spokesperson said.) Over
the same period, there were 92,561 searches for “low rise jeans” and 150,133
for “Ed Hardy.”
Paparazzi shots and film stills from the period trade online as
curiosities from a seemingly simpler yet more decadent time: Sarah Jessica
Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, Princess Diana, Britney Spears. There is young Naomi
Campbell, on the runway for Chanel, Gaultier and Versace; flashy Victoria
Beckham in her past life as a pop star; Paris Hilton in a “Don’t be Jealous”
T-shirt.
‘Being More in the
Moment’
One of Depop’s most successful sellers, according to the
company, is
Isabella Vrana, 24, whose shop promises “90s & 00s gems for u
angels.” She lives in London, employs three people and has sold more than
16,000 pieces to those eager to cosplay an earlier existence.
On a recent podcast, Vrana learned about the fear in the late
1990s of a “millennium bug” that could collapse worldwide infrastructure
through date formatting errors. The idea that technology could fail was
shocking to her. She recalled her boyfriend’s mother telling her about a time
before cellphones, when, if you lost a friend during an evening out, you’d have
to go home and sit by the landline. “That just seemed so cool to me,” Vrana
said. “I like the idea of people just being more in the moment.”
To crush on the past is a respite, she said, from “the things
that we do a lot, but hate, like being on our phones all the time or taking 50
nearly identical photos and then obsessively checking through and finding your
favorite.”
‘Hot and Unbothered’
In the ’90s and aughts, Northman said, people seemed more “like
themselves.” Sure, today’s celebrities perform openness through social media,
but often, she noted, they are actually the opposite: strategic and controlled.
Northman loves the way celebrities appeared to dress
effortlessly in the ’90s, in oversize suits with unbuttoned shirts,
thong-revealing jeans, ironic T-shirts and sparkly halters. And the way they
draped themselves over new partners and smoked on the red carpet, or got drunk
and said quippy things. It seems, she said, that everyone was “hot and
unbothered.”
For her, images of, say, a teenage Kate Moss taking a drag from
a cigarette provoke a strange longing for sensations and scenes she can’t quite
summon but imagines she would like: evenings out without selfies; the smell of
smoke in a nightclub; the sound of a friend, unanticipated and unplanned,
knocking at the front door, asking you to come and hang out.
Charlotte Mitchell, a 21-year-old law student in Manchester,
England, said she imagines the ’90s and ’00s to be “like now, except social
media is not a thing, so everyone is just dressing how they want to.” Last
year, Urban Outfitters, where she works part time, went big on the Von Dutch
revival, peddling ’00s-style tank tops and trucker hats. She bought a cute top
bearing the logo, thinking it was a cool new brand. Her 30-year-old manager
disapproved, she said, scoffing, “You weren’t even born.”
The Power of Paris
Harriet Russell, 21, wears three sparkling tooth gems,
straightens her hair and buys her ’90s stuff on eBay. “It’s usually some mum
clearing out her loft who doesn’t know what everything’s actually worth,” said
Russell, who lives in East London. Her saved searches include D&G,
Walé Adeyemi, vintage Burberry, Air Max 95 and Miss Sixty.
Russell said she likes channeling Paris Hilton’s rich-girl
“persona.” She loves the “sunglasses in the club” look, the “designer bag, big
logo,” the skin on show. To her, such fashion seems “liberating,” she said. “We
need and want to be carefree.”
Indeed, the
Paris Hilton of the past (she is now 40), once a
bastion of playful nihilism, has become an unlikely hero to some half her age.
Nicole Stark, a 19-year-old whose Depop shop, GlowNic, promises “Y2K x 90s
garmz Black owned,” agreed that Hilton, a billionaire’s daughter with a persona
built on blindness to her own privilege, would most likely have been canceled
if she had risen to prominence today. Nevertheless, Stark loves her, viewing
her as a “powerful woman” who refused to conform.
To Stark and many of those interviewed, the stories of female
celebrities such as Hilton, who came of age in an entertainment industry
dominated by men, provide models not only of outlandishness as rebellion, but
also of women who were savvier than many people gave them credit for.
For many in Gen Z, Hilton, with her sparkly outfits, unbridled
confidence and pouty refusal to work day jobs or capitulate to appropriateness,
as immortalized in “The Simple Life,” encapsulates the freedom of the era — the
humor, ease and flippancy.
“She just did whatever she wanted,” Mitchell said, almost awed.
“She wasn’t influenced by anybody.”
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