Low-rise, wide-leg jeans, cropped cardigans, and halter tops — Gen Z has adopted all of these Y2K fashion trends as their own.
The early 2000s have, no doubt, come back.
With Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker bringing back the early 2000s pop-punk music scene, fashion is coming with it. Avril Lavigne will release a new album at the end of this year, and Willow Smith’s latest release, “Lately I Feel Everything,” is an experimental pop-punk track.
And while Gen Z has left some things in the past (think skirts over jeans, Uggs everywhere, and capris), millennials are more concerned with the mindset that came with early 2000s fashion trends rather than the clothes themselves
The root of millennial beauty standards in those days stemmed from a desire for thinness and to achieve a ‘heroin chic‘-thin, pale, bony–aesthetic.
Low-rise jeans seem to especially strike a nerve, as many see them as a way to show off your body rather than your taste in fashion.
And some are concerned this lends to a new wave of fat-phobia.
One Tik-Toker, Jessica Blair, explained that body-shaming was alive and well in the Y2K era.
“Anybody above a size 2 seemed to be demonized, fat people were blatantly ignored and clothing options for plus-sized people in the early 2000s were virtually nonexistent, thereby completely excluding fat people from fashion,” she said in one TikTok.
So while repeating history with butterfly clips and cropped cardigans are certainly cute, we need to remember to leave the toxic mindset that accompanied them in the past.
