Bucking the trend: Noughties fashion (part 1)

As we’ve now entered a new decade it’s natural to look back at the last one and ask-what changed? TV and magazines have been full to the brim recently of pieces reminding us that before the turn of the millennium we’d never heard of YouTube, believed the Spice Girls would last forever and thought Big Brother was just a literary reference. It’s easy to spot the changes in culture, the media, and technology, but what about fashion? The 60’s had the mini, in the 70’s it was all about flares and in the 80’s you couldn’t move for shoulder padded, power dressing. So what did the 00’s have? …Well, all of the above.

It seems the benefits of recycling even reached the powers that be who decide what’s in and what’s out. There has never been so much confusion about how to define the fashion of an era before. Even the 90’s had adidas trackies for crying out loud. Maybe it was just hard to identify a fashion era when actually in its midst, or maybe designers did just run out of ideas? Whatever the reason we’re left with the first period in recent history where there was no easily identifiable new look.

So what were we wearing? Why were we wearing it? And was there anything that we hadn’t seen before? No not really*. Everyone from Alexander Wang to Christian Dior sent sixties miniskirts down the runway in spring 09, and Betsey Johnson never leaves a fluffy, fifties prom dress out of her collections. Hell we all jumped on the classical bandwagon and dressed our tootsies in the finest gladiatorial leather because Alexander McQueen brought Roman sandals back in 2006. Every time we thought we were at the cutting edge of fashion-we were actually at the cutting edge of our parents’ fashion. Who hasn’t experienced the inevitable rain on their ‘look at my brand new purchase’ parade when their mum whips a carbon copy out of the loft and exclaims ‘Oh we all wore those in my day. Look we can match!’? There’s no doubt about it, there isn’t much left that hasn’t been designed before. Interesting, but in terms of distinguishing noughties fashion: so far, so undefined.

*To be fair, yes there was. I am unaware of a sighting of the humble Jegging masquerading as an appropriate substitute for the bottom half of an outfit before the noughties. But the less said about that the better.

Recycling in the noughties by amandamyers featuring Faith boots

The familiar trends we adopted in the noughties.