“I’m a messy eater,” admits Isaiah Lat, a 20-year-old student, DJ and stylist from Chicago. “I used to wipe away stains, but now I don’t mind a little oil or a little spaghetti on my face. shorts. I think it’s chic.”
He doesn’t believe a term has yet been coined for the way he likes to dress. “It’s probably this dystopian, Mad Max, pirate, Steam Punk, mythological vibe,” he says, big on thrift and DIY; he likes skinny jeans, capri pants and sunglasses with a visor. He doesn’t pile on the pasta sauce before leaving the house, but says he likes his clothes to be “slightly stained.”
There is a new mood in fashion: aesthetically varied, but its disparate elements: camouflage, combat shorts and grunge-y plaid; gothic-inspired makeup and stomp boots; silhouettes and garments inspired by 2010s indie sleaze; T-shirts emblazoned with slogans inspired by nihilistic internet humor – project a communal vibe. Daniel Rodgers, digital fashion writer at British Vogue, says much of it comes from the rebellious energy of kids “born in 2000 who are trying to reclaim the things that millennials have written off as losers.” It is often a bit dirty, a bit greasy, crumpled and raw.
It’s a big step away from the homogenous looks that have dominated visual culture for a decade, including sleek, mass-produced athleisure and the ubiquitous “clean girl” trend, which problematically centers influencers who are Hailey Bieber (or look like) white, softly blushing skin and huge fluffy eyebrows.
“The style of young people has changed quite a bit in the last four years,” says Sean Monahan, the trend forecaster who predicted it all in his 2021 article warning of a coming “vibe shift.” In particular, Monahan has noted “a huge step away from streetwear,” for which he blames the “crypto bros” and “hype dads” who spend too much money on limited-edition designer clothes. He said he heard the death knell in a mall in 2019 when he saw a father wearing head-to-toe streetwear-inspired Balenciaga, sitting next to his mortified-looking teenage son. “I thought: this is not going to last as a youth movement!”
Lat, the 20-year-old with stained pants, says he gets fashion inspiration from people he sees at raves, many of whom, he has noticed, have started dressing in ways that can feel “clunky and inappropriate” to outsiders . He thinks the look goes hand in hand with the scene of “synth-techno” music from artists like Charli , Shygirl and A.G. Cook. It’s a deliberate rejection of the mainstream. “We are tired of late-stage capitalist fashion,” he says. “In the wake of the Trump presidency, with the conservative Supreme Court and our rights taken away, we want to dance and look good – and this is our way of showing the government and corporations that we don’t need them.”
Agus Panzoni, trends spokesperson for Depop, says we are in the midst of a “rise of referential fashion,” where “specific references can be brought into a personal style depending on your own sensibilities.”
This way of dressing inspired Charli what it means to be an internet trendsetter today. They’re all wearing quirky, unique looks, from Gabbriette Bechtel’s gothic-white foundation to Julia Fox’s claw-like nails.
Even their eyebrows are rebellious, at least compared to the decades-long trend of huge HD brows: Bechtel’s are pencil-thin; at least three of the others have had theirs bleached to invisibility.
The video’s aesthetic plays into a return to “street style,” says Monahan, who doesn’t feel like she’s “brand or product focused.” That’s something Johnny Cirillo, one of New York City’s best-known street style photographers, has also noticed; he has never seen such a variety of looks on the streets as he has this past year. “There’s so much going on; so much gothic. Lots of facial jewelry – big, huge metal pieces, almost Mad Max. More robotic things – like metal shells. You can see that people’s ideas are constantly changing, that they are scrolling at night and shopping on eBay, Grailed and Depop.”
Panzoni also notes a rise in what she calls “IRL-ness” in fashion: Young people are gravitating toward faux fur coats, for example, after the decades-long dominance of puffer jackets, shredded wool sweaters and the bright hues typically associated with online shopping.
One of the main proponents of this look is Julia Fox, who is known for going viral for her wild, imaginative and often barely visible clothing (“I’m so Julia,” Charli XCX sings in 360; Lat tells me she is: “our fashion messiah!”) Fox’s stylist and friend Briana Andalore grew up saving clothes and hanging out with drag queens in downtown Manhattan, and wears those influences with pride. Even now that she has access to all the designer brands, Andalore tells me she still makes outfits from items that other people have thrown away as trash when she feels like it. In OMG Fashion, the TV show she is currently working on with Fox, she says: “We show how to make clothes from shower curtains. You don’t have to have a lot of money. That has always been part of the fantasy.”
Youth revolt through DIY fashion is of course not a new idea: punks were already working on it in the 1970s. To some extent, millennials themselves did the same, says Monahan, who sees a “cultural rhyme” in the way many millennials, who grew up in the heyday of Abercrombie and Fitch marketing, discovered vintage clothing and an indie aesthetic when they went to the University.
Yet there is something particularly nihilistic about what is happening now, Rodgers says. The way people are “digging into the looks of the last fifteen years of mainstream culture and putting them all together in a wild pile of fire” and taking samples from subcultures without the “lifestyle commitments” that used to be part of wearing those clothes. He says that when micro-trends are in fashion at the moment, they are here to stay: “So everything is trending at once. Everything is porous and hazy; it’s kind of a free for all.”
Panzoni says that many young people harbor ideas about “creating yourself without worrying about the rules; an idea that as long as you are yourself, you look good.”
A very specific, Internet-based humor is also a big part of the new vibe. Sabina Meschke’s wardrobe is an example of this. The 27-year-old comedian and coffee shop worker who lives in Bed Stuy says she’s referring to her own childhood in Florida when she gets dressed. Her most beloved pieces include “a baby doll dress with huge puff sleeves and little bows around it in hunting camouflage” by independent, Florida-based designer Taylor Dorry, and a shirt that combines the slogan “Hooked on Jesus” with printed graphic ruffled sleeves of clowns.
She likes slogans; she likes to wear a hat that says “I don’t work here” when she’s at work.
Angela Qian, a 22-year-old who just graduated from Berkeley with a degree in economics, shares photos of her outfits online. She says her appearance is rooted in “post-ironic” online communities. (Post-irony, she says, “is hard to explain, but a lot of it comes down to surrealism and things that don’t really make sense.”) She has a strong connection to cult brands like Haunted Starbucks, which seem designed with precision. to baffle those who are not chronically online. Examples of clothing items include a backless hoodie with an image of Oprah printed on it next to the text: CUM and sneakers emblazoned with an image of SpongeBob SquarePants next to the phrase “Live Laugh Love”.
Post-irony is common among cult brand designers who target young people who grew up with memes. For example, the brand Uncle Inc makes a pair of bright pink, Juicy Couture-inspired hot pants with the word Rancid written on the butt in a horror movie-style blood-dripping font. The idea, says co-founder Alex Holmes, was to juxtapose the “hot girl” aesthetic with the recognition that “I’m dirty too.” Other hits include shirts with lyrics such as ‘Ketamine Tuesday’ and, in collaboration with actor Rachel Sennott, ‘So Exhausted From Carrying Around My Big Heaving Boots All Day’.
Fortunately, it seems unlikely that such slogans will be adopted by the hype dads anytime soon – although some elements of this style are already showing signs of making their way into the mainstream. Even Hailey Bieber, the ultimate icon for the clean girl look, dresses a bit more chaotically, Rodgers notes, somehow reflecting what’s happening on the streets. She’s wearing a football jersey with slacks and cowboy boots, or a poet’s sleeve shirt, Fila shorts and a Mary Jane, like someone being sifted through a lost and found box on sports day.”
But for now, Rodgers says, the look has yet to “crystallize into a marketable aesthetic,” and at its sharpest edge, with its spots and sometimes outrageous humor, its DIY nature and its wild variety, it’s tribal , understood and supported by experts. It may resist adoption for a while, Monahan argues, because it’s a very “youth-optimized strategy” for dressing. There’s nothing forgiving or flattering about chaotic, unstructured outfits. He puts it simply: not everyone can wear ugly fashion. It is a look that you can only achieve if you are very attractive. It’s a bit ironic, but it’s also a bit of a challenge to be able to convey some of the looks that I see.”
The outfits may look strange, even “ugly,” to the rest of us. Or perhaps this new youth mood – which is not led by brands, but where inventiveness and second-hand clothing take center stage – is in response to a decade of face-tuned influencers, ultra-fast fashion, digitized social lives and wildly commercialized, screen-led homogeneity. quite beautiful.
Johnny Cirillo’s Watching New York: Street Style A to Z is out now