Every day as I walk the hallways of the Boston high school where I work, teenagers pile past me in loud gregarious groups, sweet little duos and trios, or all alone, charging toward one of the many obligations that regiment their adolescent lives. They look, almost all of them, like they have teleported out of the late 1990s or the early 2000s.
I see youths sporting tiny shirts and massive jeans, corset-like tops that cut away to reveal hip bones, baggy T-shirts, Leo DiCaprio hair and feathered bangs with layers, low-rise skirts, sweat suits — all unmistakably Y2K. An unspoken memo seems to have been passed around to not venture into the leggings, terrible eyeliner, or maniacally straightened hair of the late 2000s or to regress as far as the bouffants and shoulder pads of the ’80s.
There is something touching about it: Children dressing up in the childhoods of their parents, like a bunch of ’50s greasers scrupulously mantling themselves in the flapper dresses and androgynous bobs of the previous generation. And something strange. It’s a performance of innocence by innocents, a warmed-over naivete. It’s cute and silly, but it isn’t theirs.
It’s missing the recklessness and imperfection of actual youth fashion trends. Sure, they have superficially daring cuts, baring their bellies and letting their pants sag low. But it’s not chaotic or rebellious — not really. We’ve seen it all before. They’ve seen it all before, passed and repassed through the billion filters of social media until the dross has been refined and only the best of the aesthetic remains and becomes mainstream.
They get the silhouettes too right, pairing clunky oversized jeans perfectly with boxy T-shirts, or sinuous tank tops that rise, sylphlike, out of dragging peasant skirts. They’ve corrected the flaws of their elders and perform an insouciant intelligence that seems like a question that begs to be answered: Why couldn’t we have gotten it right the first time?
I remember much worse fashion as a teenager. We were flailing toward adulthood in the late aughts, but no matter our efforts, most of us had some fatal flaw to our stylings, some peccadillo that betrayed our childishness. The perfect skinny jeans paired with brick-like hiking sandals. Layered camisoles hampered by ratty lace that — try as we might — would not sit effortlessly flat on our pubescent bellies, muddling the seductive note we were trying to hit. Our knock-off Uggs, flaunted in the New England winter, crusted over with rock salt until they had tidal lines.
We got style wrong, but isn’t that the price of fashion? The point of trends, as I see them, is a bloodless survival of the fittest. We watch to see who gets them, enhancing their own appeal while communicating savviness to the watching world. We notice those who pull bits of an aesthetic here, bits of it there, but are ultimately unable to blend the personal and the faddish; the oblivious, who pay no attention to trends out of ignorance or innocence; and the confident few who ignore trends in order to build something better: their own aesthetic world.
This lack of failure, of risk, of novelty is what alternately fascinates and bothers me as I watch the hordes of students rush past me, the perfected facsimiles of my youthful fashion their everyday high school wardrobe.
Despite what the news would suggest, the fashion says: The kids are fine. They’re getting it right. They’re getting it too right.
