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The energy of Y2K
Before diving into Y2K fashion, it’s helpful to remember what was happening globally from 1999 to the early part of the 2000s. After all, Y2K is the shorthand way to write “the year 2000.” If the moniker conveys a certain futuristic brevity, that’s somewhat by design—it echoes the influence of the burgeoning digital age in the zeitgeist. It was the turn of the millennium and the future was on everyone’s mind. The tech advances were rolling out quick. In the year 2000, iPods, hybrid cars, camera phones, and GPS were introduced; iTunes, Wikipedia, and Xbox came in 2001.
If that sounds cool, it definitely was—imagine going from a clunky CD player to a sleek iPod! But the promise of the new millennium also came with its share of existential dread. In fact, in 1999, “Y2K” was mostly associated a specific tech-induced panic related to the potential failure of the computer programs that ran banks, transportation, and power plants worldwide. “The Y2K bug was a computer flaw, or bug, that may have caused problems when dealing with dates beyond December 31, 1999,” National Geographic report . “The flaw, faced by computer programmers and users all over the world on January 1, 2000, is also known as the millennium bug.” Or, as the news anchors simply called it, “Y2K.”
Luckily, the Y2K bug never ultimately resulted in major malfunctions—it was fixed just in time. But there was still plenty to come: One year later, we saw the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
Pop culture provided a distraction in the truest sense. Thus, the era was driven by MTV, reality television, talk shows, tabloid magazines, and—of course—celebrities. Their fashion antics came as quick as the tech: Jennifer Lopez wore her iconic green Versace dress on the Grammy Awards red carpet in 2000; Christina Aguilera wore a skimpy sequined number to the VMA’s the same year; Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears followed up the next with head-to-toe matching denim.
The early 2000s was also a time where independent women were paving a sexy new path on shows like Sex and the City and Gilmore Girls; when reality shows like Survivor, America’s Next Top Model, and The Simple Life were must-see TV; and when the reality-bending film The Matrix had recently blown our minds. The first iterations of the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings film franchises were also released.
What is Y2K fashion?
Y2K fashion mirrored—and responded to—the uncertainty, fear, optimism, and novelty of the times with a can’t-stop-me-now attitude and a carefree, futuristic-retro vibe. The colors were bright and bold, the textures were metallic and shiny, the silhouettes were skin-baring and curve-hugging. Low-rise jeans, crop tops, and visible g-strings were designed to turn heads. Logomania and It-bags were obsessed over; as were sexy pumps, ballet flats, strappy sandals, and kitten-heeled mules. There were chunky sneakers, pointy-toed boots, and towering platform soles, too.
Of course, the aughts weren’t solely about glitz and gaudy glam; It stole references from the 1960s and 1970s, too. These skin-baring styles were the precursor to the later, softer styles of the mid-aughts boho aesthetic, which took a page from the flower children of Laurel Canyon, Haight Ashbury, and the Woodstock. Think: peasant blouses, bolero sweaters, perforated belts, prairie dresses, retro prints, denim skirts, hobo bags, slouchy boots, and skinny scarves. As championed by celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe and worn by the likes of Sienna Miller, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, and Nicole Richie, the 2000s boho look was copied near and far—especially because it was easy to dupe as long as you knew how to layer.
The Y2K fashion revival
Whether it’s ballet flats, dresses over flares, or even the re-emergence of the grande dame of high-low Y2K fashion herself, Paris Hilton (who walked the Versace spring 2023 show), the garish glamour and head-spinning eclecticism of this divisive decade in fashion have become all but inescapable. So, too, have some of the decade’s most notorious brands, from the recent revival of Baby Phat to the rebirth of Juicy Couture to the resurgence of the Ugg through modish collaborations with the likes of Feng Chen Wang and Madhappy. Meanwhile, recent years marked the 20-year anniversaries of some of the most influential pop-culture phenomena of Y2K style, from The O.C. to One Tree Hill to That's So Raven. Even better: Some of those show’s stars have been enjoying newfound fame once again—Adam Brody in Nobody Wants This, anyone?
So what prompted the re-emergence of Y2K fashion now? Like most current fashion trends, it started bubbling under—with a little help from Gen-Z influencers—on TikTok, where e-girls with retro hairstyles, beaded chokers, and butterfly clips have been happily dancing to “Mr Brightside” and lamenting that they were “born in the wrong decade.” It’s also a popular tag on every teenager’s favorite resale app, Depop, where it doesn’t take much trawling to find Miss Sixty jeans (a brand recently fronted by Bella Hadid), a Blink-182 T-shirt, or a pair of Skechers fetching hundreds of pounds. If this doesn’t make you feel old already, the fact that many of them are labelled as “vintage” might.
The nostalgia of Y2K
But it might not just be all about the youths. As it’s regularly pointed out, our current era is one of turmoil and uncertainty, too—pandemics, divisive elections, climate crisis, and global conflict—which may drive a penchant for nostalgia. “It makes sense that the aughts and Y2K fashion trends, potentially from a time when you were less stressed about the world, are back in the zeitgeist,” writer Jillian Wilson recently noted.
As for Y2K’s absorption into the upper echelons of fashion, it’s perhaps little surprise that Marc Jacobs—one of the industry’s most reliable bellwethers—was among the first to embrace it. With his Heaven diffusion, launched in 2020 in collaboration with multi-hyphenate creative Ava Nirui as a more accessible counterpart to his mainline collections, Jacobs returned to a number of formative influences spanning the late ’90s and ’00s, such as the films of Gregg Araki and the Japanese street style of Shoichi Aoki’s Fruits magazine.
“It’s very personal to me, because the first designer items that I owned were from Marc by Marc Jacobs. That was like the pinnacle of luxury for me at that time,” says Nirui. “This is the first trend that I’ve actually lived through and that I was a teenager for, so I feel super-connected to all of these vintage brands that are being recirculated,” she continues.
Y2K fashion on the runway
This nostalgic appeal also holds true for Nicola Brognano, the 30-year-old designer who took the reins at the relatively stagnant house of Blumarine at the end of 2019, with ambitions to return the brand to the heights of its ’90s and ’00s heyday. For his spring 2023 collection, Brognano doubled down on a Y2k-meets-grunge aesthetic, with a shimmering abundance of flared low-rise jeans and sheer minidresses, reminiscent of the ocean’s siren-like allure.
“I feel very close to that period because I grew up in those years, but I wanted to relive it with a modern sensibility,” Brognano says. “I wanted to show a collection that touches on happiness, sexiness, freedom. Something that breaks the rules, without being vulgar.” While the timing of the current noughties revival neatly fits the theory of trends operating on 20-year cycles, for Brognano it runs deeper than that: “It was the right moment to talk about it because people need happiness and carefree moments in their lives more than ever right now.”
Brognano is onto something. Revivalism isn’t necessarily about creating a perfect facsimile of a look from a specific moment in time, but about pulling together a pastiche that reflects our needs and wants in the present day. How we understand the style of a decade really comes into focus only with hindsight, and the disparate elements of 2000s fashion that designers are pulling from to form a cohesive picture are largely those of pre-recession decadence and unbridled party-ready glamour. As Brognano puts it, “At a time like this, we’re all seeking joy where we can find it.”
As Bruno Sialelli, the former creative director of Lanvin, sees it, the resurgence of interest in the Y2K aesthetic is a natural swinging of the pendulum, as a new generation moves up the ranks to become creative directors of some of the biggest fashion houses, revisiting their own youth in the process. “The revival of the ’00s is alive through talents that are from the same generation as me,” he told British Vogue in 2021. “To me personally, that era of MTV culture was very important. I was raised in the south of France, and as a teenager, that outlet was my access to culture. It was the way I discovered fashion, through musicians and actors.”
It’s hard to disagree: whether it’s Nicolas Ghesquière or Raf Simons revisiting the music and style of their teenage years in the ’80s, or the edgier corners of ’90s style that recur through the work of designers such as Casey Cadwallader and Glenn Martens, it’s only natural that a new guard of millennial designers should be working with the nostalgic touchstones of their own misspent youths. “We’re in a time where there’s shame associated with opulence and being over the top, so it feels almost radical in a way,” Sialelli says.
Celebrities embracing Y2K fashion
Celebrities aren’t ready to give up the 2000s aesthetic, either. Ice Spice, the princess of rap and Gen Z’s It Girl, redefined streetwear with her ultra-girly McBling ensembles, reviving matching tracksuits, bedazzled baby tees, and bubblegum pink. Embracing a more nostalgic model-off-duty vibe, Hailey Bieber, Gigi Hadid, and Emily Ratajkowski swapped out their leather blazers for boxy bomber jackets. Anne Hathaway single-handedly brought back the controversial newsboy cap, and for those who have reservations regarding the return of Moon Boots, Rihanna owns a pair, so they must be trendy.
Of course, this resurgence of interest in the ’00s goes further than fashion. The fabulously tacky aesthetic revisited by designers has coincided with a broader cultural re-evaluation of the icons that populated that decade, and the thinly veiled misogyny of the tabloid press of that time. Whether it’s Britney Spears' memoir, The Woman in Me, which exposed the ruthlessness of the paparazzi and its impact on her mental health; the rebrand of Mattel’s Barbie; or the reassessment of the public perception of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s relationship, it’s clear the lack of empathy afforded to the women whose style defined the decade was sometimes lost through fashion’s narrower lens.
Yet while the less savory aspects of ’00s pop culture deserve to be left in the past, there’s a way in which the decade’s style makes a strange kind of sense for now. Y2K has been taken over by Gen Z, a cyber generation navigating the perpetual doom and gloom on social media. Their embodiment of the style reflects their internal conflict amid these times. On one hand, they’re angry, burdened by the sense of obligation to reverse the apocalyptic millennial mess. Simultaneously, they’re tired—tired of the pressure to be perfect, wanting to just let loose. Besides, who wouldn’t want to channel that Mean Girls-esque glitzy, so-bad-it’s-good glamour? So fetch!
Not that you need to go full-on gaudy: As seen on the streets of Paris Fashion Week Spring 2025, there are plenty of ways to embrace the softer side of Y2K. Regardless of how you wear it—if at all—perhaps the reason the decade has made such a full-throated return lies in the simple fact that we’re all seeking to experience some fun in our fashion. Where the Roaring Twenties had flappers dripping with beads and feathers, there’s every chance we’ll be wearing glittering sequined crop tops, mini cardigans we crocheted ourselves, and baggy jeans slung dangerously low across our hips. So we’ll see you on the other side, living our very best Y2K fantasy on the dance floor. We’ve earned it.