the Y2K craze is in full swing

Ashanti - Rock Wit U

    When I was a kid my mom had a pair of cargo pants and listened to Kylie Minogue off of a CD downloaded from LimeWire. My favorite movie was the Incredibles and Will Smith was the best actor in the world (that's what I thought anyway.) I liked Avril Lavigne and Hello Kitty bags. Then when I became a teenager in the 2010s I moved onto a tumblr grunge-style, and broadened my listening horizons to underground artists, and that previous decade sort of faded out for a while. But there's a theory about trends and this is especially true when it comes to fashion: that it recycles every 20 years. Everything that was popular 20 years ago comes back around and the generation that only has vague memories of that time will try to emulate what they absorbed and thus, we have a Y2K comeback. Fashion is just commentary, an appreciation of history. The images and color schemes I saw as a kid has now come back into my life.

    You don't need to look any further than TikTok to find that this is true. Y2K fashion has now gotten so big that major stores are listing it as a category now. There are tons of small shops on Etsy that will send you packages of Y2K related accessories and clothes. It seems to be a market that only people 30 and younger tend to be into but I have a feeling that it will become even larger.

   

    The first time I saw someone doing this was in 2016 when a YouTube Channel called "the Milk Club" posted this fashion lookbook inspired by 2000s pop culture and cinema which I was captivated by:

    

    I loved everything about this video, down to the simple but appealing neutral color scheme to the glossy Destiny's Child sunglasses. It went from, "wow I can't believe this used to be popular," to a style that would take over the fashion market in 4 years. Now, people have gone beyond Von Dutch and low rise jeans to more alternative styles: emo, cybergoth, skater punk, pop punk, all things that were prevalent during that time. Machine Gun Kelly switched to the pop punk aesthetic with Mainstream Sellout and made it a #1 album. Versace's Spring-Summer 2023 women's fashion show was loaded with Y2K themes, even having Paris Hilton, the queen of the decade herself, walk down the runway. 

there's some late 90s inspiration to this style as well

    I sort of feel that we were all super incapsulated     with 9/11 that pop culture sort of came to a halt, or at  least shifted its focus elsewhere. Fashion became     something of ridicule, for the Regina George's of the  world. This viewpoint of shallowness in fashion is     largely a misogynistic, and probably homophobic      one, because feminine pursuits tend to be      downgraded in importance. People had no sympathy   for girls like Hilton, Nicole Ritchie, Britney, Anna      Nicole-Smith, Lindsay Lohan, though nobody would  understand the actual horrors these women faced      until a full decade later when male celebrities began paying for it with the #MeToo movement.

    On the other side of this was the counter-culture, alternative explosion. I remember when people first started describing emo when Myspace was the largest social media platform in the world. There people shared their ideas for aesthetics for the first time over the internet. It sort of looked like this:

poetry

    A recent song that was just released by underground artist Ayesha Erotica, who frequently collaborates with artist Charli XCX:

    

Here are some more looks that I think perfectly capture the Y2K craze. I expect this trend to only get bigger as we move into the 2020s. It personally gives me joy because it reminds me of the teenagers I used to want to be when I was a kid, or when I watched the music video Helena by My Chemical Romance for the first time, or Paramore's Riot! album on my pink iPod with cord headphones (funnily enough, I heard those came back in style too.) I've even seen people thrifting for old CD and tape players to really capture the style and give it an authentic, back in time feel. There may be some element of wanting to go back to a more stable timeline, since our current history feels so chaotic. In fact, this trend really took off during the 2020 pandemic when everyone was inside on their phones. I guess when people have a lot of time they'll draw inspiration from different places. 

  

    Will this trend fade away eventually? I think so, probably around the halfway mark of this decade when it goes mainstream and becomes irrelevant again. I like to think my closet has a mixture of different decades in it, but Y2K has caught a special place in my heart and I think there are some parts of it I'll keep wearing even well past its prime. If you're curious to learn more about this style, I suggest following some of these hashtags on any social media platform, but especially TikTok and Instagram:

#cybery2k #y2k #y2kgoth #y2kaesthetic #y2kfashion

Show me what you find the comments! I'll be looking for lots of Happy Bunnys. 

xoxo