According to Gen Z, there are many ways to “spot” a millennial – none of them good. Their socks are too short. Their jeans are too tight. They make the “heart sign” with their whole hand, rather than in that weird way with two fingers against the face. They have side fringes and French tucks and “going out tops”. Their style is cheugy by nature, as if a line were drawn between those born in 1996 and those born a year later, dividing those with bleached eyebrows on one side and with barely any eyebrows at all on the other.
Over the past year, however, something curious has happened. Something strange and a little uncanny. Look around, outside, or in the club, and you’ll see what looks like millennial style everywhere. But wait, isn’t that person 21 years old? You’ll think to yourself, confused. I thought they hated how millennials dressed?? Interesting, then, that we’re suddenly seeing all manner of millennial trend comebacks: skirts over trousers, leopard-print coats, even going out tops. I have a feeling, deep in my soul, that we’re about to see a whole load of side fringes. Skinny jeans are back with a vengeance. Big fat skate trainers have been making their cursed return. Not so tragic after all then, hmm?
“Millennial style” of course encompasses a wide range of different eras and images, many of them unrelated (the millennial age bracket includes everyone born between 1981 and 1996, so it’s quite a sweeping range). There’s the early to mid 2000s vibe of low-rise jeans and zip-up hoodies. There’s the early 2010s style of side fringes and leopard print and black tights beneath denim booty riders. There’s the whole indie sleaze side of things (ciggies, digital cameras and red lipstick, etc). “Millennial style” is basically a catch-all phrase for a bunch of different trends and outfit choices over various time frames. But, look, Gen Z is copycatting them all. Even coin belts. Remember coin belts? Yeah, they’re jingle-jangling back down the street, alongside puff ball skirts. It’s like Skins out there.
None of this should actually come as a surprise. The 20-year trend cycle comes for us all – and, since the pandemic, we’ve also simultaneously seen that trend cycle accelerate. While everyone’s been dressing like they’re from 2004 for the past couple of years, they’re also starting to dress like they’re from 2014. It can give you whiplash, the ways in which style is a constant nod to not-so-distant history, which itself was pick pocketed from the past. There has “never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artefacts of its own immediate past”, wrote Simon Reynolds in his 2010 book Retromania. “How did we get trapped in a self-imposed time capsule machine?” asked Hannah Ewens in VICE. “Whatever the answer, the pace of the nostalgia trip has gotten so fast its tripping over itself.”
When you’re a teenager, you tend to think you invented something, because you’re too young to care about what happened before (and rightly so; you’re supposed to be self-absorbed as a teenager). I remember finding it weird how my mum and her friends would laugh about me wearing skinny jeans because that’s what they wore in the 1980s. No one remembers the 1980s, I remember thinking, because I didn’t personally. Now, I’m the one having those same thoughts about Ugg boots and parkas. It’s a fun house mirror out there, and nobody is immune – especially if you’re over the age of 25. One moment you’re cringing at a style choice and the next you’re thinking hmm, maybe I should whack out the foundation lips like a semifinalist on The X Factor in 2008.
Of course, it’s not escaping me that when Gen Z lambasts millennial style, they’re usually talking about a particular type of millennial woman – the type in brown ankle boots and a wide-brimmed hat, with a “Live Laugh Love” sign in her bathroom and cartoon avocados on her phone case (I don’t know that woman, I think she lives in America??). If we’re talking about actual millennial trends, though – as in, everything teens and young people wore throughout the 2000s and early 2010s – then the style has never been more omnipresent. Nothing has ever looked as millennial as it does right now. We’re this close [pinches thumb and forefinger together] to a BOY London revival.
The oldest members of Gen Z are now 27 – hardly bastions of youth culture themselves. Generation Alpha are creeping up behind them, with their Twitch streams and their complicated water bottles. And there will be a time, in the very near future, in which they mock the trends that Gen Z used to swear by: bleached eyebrows and Tabi shoes and deadpan selfies or whatever else. Spin, spin goes the carousel, with none of us able to get off.
