I’ve been obsessing over this year’s return to relevance of a fashion brand that I wore 20 years ago: 7 for All Mankind. It’s once again selling the low-rise jeans that made it famous, now alongside the rest of the 2006 uniform: hip-hugger belts, tiny jackets with princess shoulders and giant, comically impractical platform heels. In a runway show during New York Fashion Week last month, it doubled down on hyping a self-consciously 2006 tousled party girl.
These deliberately messy clothes feel deeply familiar to me. I wore them all the first time around. My friends and I mixed vintage with repurposed clothing: shrunken leather jackets off the racks at Buffalo Exchange, plus a skinny scarf stolen from rail-thin rock boys who bought their jeans from the Gap’s girls department.
So it’s been equal parts hilarious and destabilizing to watch the look of my early 20s reappear, to rapturous praise, on the Instagram feeds of very stylish friends who are actually in their early 20s. I understand this is an established-to-the-point-of-cliché pattern. Isn’t there some adage about living long enough to see the music and the clothes of your youth repackaged and sold back to you? Fine.
But skinny jeans and white belts? Really? In an era when even teenagers are plumping, smoothing, nipping and tucking their way into uniformity, it suddenly feels luxurious to look undone, to be able to afford that kind of recklessness, sartorially and emotionally. Quiet luxury, the dominant fashion philosophy of the past few years, was never about restraint so much as erasure: the expensive, exhausting work of looking as if you have no visible seams, no history, no night before.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing