Picture this: The year is 2003. Britney Spears’s masterful In the Zone is climbing the charts, social media has not yet taken over our lives, and Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are taking over our TV screens on The Simple Life wearing Von Dutch trucker hats.
These were simpler, sillier times! Sure, Y2K fashion gets a bad rap in general, and it may have been gaudy at times—remember when we wore huge belts with literally everything?—but it was earnest and less produced than the average celebrity ’fit you see today.
More importantly, it was fun, which is what getting dressed should be all about right now. But don’t get too sentimental about fashion of the past—because in 2021, like it or not, early-2000s style is coming back with a vengeance.
The early aughts fervor was first ignited by Gen Z last year, when they began rocking bootcut jeans and silk scarves as tops on TikTok. Soon after, we saw the aesthetic pop up on the runways too
