“Why
do Zoomers dress like that?” I asked my friend Joanne
the other day. We were sitting in a Starbucks eyeing two twentysomething
women waiting for their drinks – one wearing a crudely
cut-off denim skirt over a pair of ratty vintage Adidas warm-ups,
five-sizes-too-big military surplus bomber jacket and platform
creepers, the other wearing a double-breasted 80s-era office-formal
blazer, bike shorts, four-inch rubber-soled sandals with giant
buckles and blinding white mid-calf gym socks. They were soon
joined by a friend wearing a crochet knit bra top, acid wash
mom jeans, dirty white sneakers, gold-mirrored gas station
sunglasses and at least three zit patches.
“It’s
like they fell in a Good Will bin and played dress-up in the
dark,” she replied.
No
use in sugar-coating it: GenZ style is a sh*t sandwich. The
basic recipe is to layer ill-fitting Y2K sweatshop deadstock
over a vintage 1970s Butterick pattern creation and accessorize
with kitsch 80s home-made jewelry, piercings in unusual places
(tongue, eyebrow, the column between their two nostrils) and
something kawaii–the emetic ‘Hello Kitty’
cutesiness Japanese girls never grow out of.
The
general vibe is chaotic, hopeless and insolvent–which,
to their credit, pretty much describes the state of the world.
Might
as well get it over with and cue the naysayers. Go on, say
it.
***hairy
eyeball*** Old man shakes cane, yells ‘get off my lawn’.
Every
generation dismisses the next one in line as feckless, decadent
and lost.
‘Offbeat’
is how young people are supposed to dress. It’s a function
of higher risk-taking, something that diminishes with age.
That
final point was from Joanne, who reminded me that in high
school, we probably considered this cool.
Point taken. But even at our worst moments, we GenXers dressed
like we had aspirations or basic competence, maybe even a
little grit in the face of some major crisis. Can you imagine
any of these three storming the beaches of Normandy?
Who knows? Maybe it’s all a ploy to wriggle out of the
draft. Except for the guy on the right who looks like the
aliens made contact and asked him to meet on that particular
corner.
I
showed some images of New York fashion students back for their
first day of class it to a precocious Zoomer friend who shrugged
and said “yeah? So their outfits look weird to you.
That’s because you’re old, they’re young
and in a process of self-discovery. They’re bound to
dress eccentrically.”
Me:
By ‘eccentric’ you mean . . .
Precocious
Zoomer: Outside the norm. Not conventional.
Me:
Define conventional.
Precocious
Zoomer: Professional, normal.
Me:
But every last person in this video is dressed unconventionally.
Which makes it the convention.
Precocious
Zoomer: ***furls brow, scratches head***
Curiously,
there is one student in the video who happens to dress unconventionally,
which is to say conventionally. Wandering around campus, he
may have been mistaken for a finance intern from Nebraska,
yet he’s the I’d vote most likely to have his
own fashion house one day.
Did you catch the second season of The White Lotus? If so,
you may have noticed the absurd wardrobe of Portia, the personal
assistant to Tanya, the eccentric and emotionally scarred
heiress portrayed by Jennifer Coolidge. If you were paying
close attention, you would have noticed two things: a) Portia's
wardrobe epitomized the TikTok Zoomer aesthetic, and b) amidst
a cast of unsavory characters, including a group of debauched
murderous gays, a duo of glamorous grifting hookers, and a
Stanford grad dimwitted enough to fall for one of the grifting
hookers, Portia emerged as the internet-declared true villain.
Critics characterized her as insufferably passive and self-absorbed.
I
can't help but think the vitriol she faced was largely influenced
by her wardrobe, curated from the hottest designs and designers
in the fashion universe.
Still, Portia’s cosmic psychedelic binder bandeau and
matching high-waisted leggings have nothing on Tinasha’s
outfit.
Like you, I have no idea who Tinasha is, nor do I know where
to even begin with this outfit. If I had to guess, between
those dishwasher gloves and shoe mops, she’s on the
cleaning staff at Vogue.
‘Cleaner’
might be one of the few remaining opportunities left for this
generation, hence—at the risk of reading too much into
it—the unseriousness of their style choices. Already,
they’ve lived through a disastrously mismanaged health
crisis, leading to trillions in printed money, the worst inflation
in 40 years, AI obliterating entire industries and home ownership–once
the most reliable path to wealth– officially out of
reach. Hell, home rentership is out of reach. No wonder their
outfits radiate uneasiness. Or maybe it all just makes me
feel uneasy.
Perhaps
this is what future fashion historians zero in on when picking
through the rubble of the 2020s. Wandering around in their
silver spacesuits, they’ll uncover that back-to-school
video or Anna Wintour’s idea of a cleaner’s uniform
et voila, they’ll have their Rosetta Stone–the
key to unlocking the moment Western civilization began to
slide in earnest.
