Fashion: Retro too soon: The return of Y2K

Culture Ed. Shannon Keating (BuzzFeed News, 5/24/21); Ashley Wells (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

The terrifying resurgence of Y2K fashions

It's time to get dressed. Let's shop.

Please, for the love of god(s), don’t make me wear low-rise jeans again!

I first sensed it last summer while trawling the resale app Depop for platform sandals and funky-colored windbreakers to treat my mid-pandemic malaise.

Browsing teenagers’ closets has started to make me feel very, “How do you do, fellow kids?” — inspiring in me the same sheepish embarrassment I get whenever I open TikTok — as is the case, I think, for many millennials on the Internet these days.

Can we just keep wearing masks and ballcaps?

We are no longer, as a generation, a cultural flashpoint. And with our increasing irrelevance and decrepitude we’ve had to accept that this is Gen Z’s world now; we’re just making feeble attempts to coexist.

I’m typically on the lookout for vintage pieces from the ’80s and ’90s — or earlier, if I’m lucky — and there are gems to be found on Depop, which is a younger, hipper alternative for secondhand shopping to more normie apps like Poshmark.

But I’ve increasingly noticed that the pieces winding up on Depop’s Explore tab are captioned by their savvy sellers with “Sooo Y2K!”

I realized with mounting horror that, for the first time in my life, vestiges from my own teenhood have now become desirably retro:... More

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