This was the year Generation Z stopped designing Millennial outfits and started copying them

According to Gen Z, there are many ways to “spot” a Millennial – none of them good. Your socks are too short. Your jeans are too tight. You make the “heart sign” with your whole hand, not in that weird way with two fingers on your face. They have side fringes and French tucks as well as “flaring tops”. Her style is inherently sassy, ​​as if a line was drawn between those born in 1996 and those born a year later, those with bleached eyebrows on one side and those with barely any eyebrows on the other have side, separate.

However, something strange happened last year. Something strange and a little eerie. Look around outside or in the club and you’ll see what looks like Millennial style everywhere. But wait, isn’t this person 21 years old?? You will think confused. I thought they hated how millennials dressed?? What’s interesting, then, is that we’re suddenly seeing all sorts of millennial trend comebacks: skirts over pants, leopard-print coats, and even cut-out pieces. I feel deep in my soul that we are about to see a whole lot of side effects. Skinny jeans are back with a vengeance. Big fat skate coaches have returned. So it’s not so tragic, is it?

Of course, “Millennial style” encompasses a wide range of different eras and images, many of which are unrelated to one another (the Millennial age group includes anyone born between 1981 and 1996, so it’s quite a wide range). There’s an early-to-mid 2000s vibe with low-slung jeans and zip-up hoodies. There’s the early 2010s style with side fringe and leopard print and black tights among denim booty riders. There’s the whole indie sleaze side (cigarettes, digital cameras and red lipstick, etc.). “Millennial style” is essentially an umbrella term for a number of different trends and outfit choices across different time periods. But you see, Generation Z is copying them all. Even coin belts. Remember coin belts? Yes, they’re strumming down the street again, next to puffball skirts. It’s like Skins outside.

Actually, none of this should come as a surprise. The 20-year trend cycle affects us all – and since the pandemic, we have also seen this trend cycle accelerate. While everyone has been dressing like they’re from 2004 for the last few years, they’re now starting to dress like they’re from 2014. It can give you whiplash when you see… how the style constantly hints at the not-so-distant history, itself plundered from the past. There has “never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past,” wrote Simon Reynolds in his 2010 book Retromania. “How did we end up in a self-imposed time capsule machine?” asked Hannah Ewens VICE. “Whatever the answer, the pace of the nostalgia trip has become so fast that it is tripping over itself.”