Fashion disasters we all experienced as teenagers in the early 2000s

The early 2000’s was a dark, horrible time. It was a time of MSN, BBM and AIM. It was a time of concealer lips, eyeliner on the insides of your eyelids and a complete lack of any discernible eyebrows. It was a time of horrible, truly horrible fashion.

Say what you want about preteens and annoying teenagers nowadays, posing with their hands in front of their face and looking like teeny tiny hard men, but they’ll never truly have as much to be ashamed of as we did. They never experienced the horror of fashion like this.

Ra-Ra skirts

There was nothing that perfectly encompassed casual, cool, but girly chic in the 00s quite like a ra-ra skirt, inevitably paired with a pair of dayglo footless tights and Converse lo-tips. You thought you looked like you were in a mid-afternoon Disney Channel show about cool teens and their problems – in reality you looked like a dancer in a Duran Duran video (your mum probably made this joke at the time and you scoffed because you didn’t know who they were).

But whatever, when you shook your hips it flared out which was very cute and flouncy.

Footless tights

Nobody would have survived this decade without footless tights. You wanted to wear your denim mini skirts, you wanted to show off your ankles, but your mum went mad when you tried to go bare-legged (and honestly 13-year-old you was worried about shaving rash and whether or not you were fat – you weren’t) so what did you do? You bought 50+ pairs of footless tights and embraced life.

Coloured tights

The Saturdays have a lot to answer for.

Really long bootleg jeans

Nowadays you can probably get away with wearing your jeans a good few times before you wash them (don’t pretend you don’t do this, you do), because they’re black, tight and cut way above the ankle. You could not do this with the jeans you wore in the 2000s, because they were four inches longer than your legs, you wore them into town and it rained and mum went mad about them being covered in mud. To be fair they were expensive stone washed ones from River Island.

Bonus points if they were cut ridiculously low, bedazzled and worn with an exposed thong.

Newsboy caps

Blame Keira Knightley in Love Actually all you want but these were a thing we actually wore and thought were cute and that’s something we’re all responsible for.

Ugg boots

You wanted them because Paris and Nicole wore them with perfectly tanned stick thin legs and denim minis and huge bags and sunglasses. So obviously if you bought Uggs you’d look the same. After months wearing fakes and begging and pleading with your parents to get you them for your birthday or Christmas they arrived, you immediately walked funny in them because they slumped on on side and whenever it rained they went an ugly two tone colour. But you still wore them religiously.

Ed Hardy

Ed Hardy was a crime, is a crime and will always be a crime. There’s nothing I could write which would convince you otherwise.

Rhinestone tinted sunglasses

Much like Lizzie McGuire in this picture, you couldn’t tell me nothin when I put these babies on.

Velour tracksuits (bonus points if they were Juicy Couture)

JC trackies were really at the cutting edge of 2000s athleisure lewks, Supreme infant hypebeasts have a lot to thank them for. Unlike today’s sportswear though, the tighter the better with Juicy. You might even get to zip the hoodie down to show a little tiny bit more padded-to-the-gods cleavage once you got out of your mums car. Last year they launched their ‘Nextgen’ campaign so maybe we’ll all return to this soon. I hope so, there’s nothing quite as glamorous as having the word ‘juicy’ stretched across your ass.

Skateboarding shoes

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that if you were a wannabe alterna-teen in the 2000s you owned one of the following pairs of trainers: Etnies or DC’s. You tippexed song lyrics on the sides, you changed the muticoloured huge laces once a month, and you lived in constant fear that someone would ask you at some point to skateboard for them because you did not have a fucking clue how to skateboard.

Platform flip flops

The footwear choice of every mean girl in Nickelodeon after school TV shows, usually called Courtney or Britney. You were desperate to have them because a) actually mum they’re not heels they’re flip-flops and you felt sassy as fuck wearing them. Then you pierced the foam or fell in them and they were ruined forever.