(Originally published in July 2015 on Fashion Research) A friend of mine recently shared this Allure article on social media, and those of us who were in our teens and early twenties during the period in question had a good laugh. No bright young thing survived the 1990s without sampling at least some of the styles the author describes.
But as we quipped back and forth it occurred to me that the article didn’t seem to get 1990s fashion at all. White girls with super skinny eyebrows and tiny, tiny hairclips in their cornrows? Well, personally I thought that was stupid even at the time. But Björk buns, brown lipstick, and body glitter? These deserve thought. To dismiss the 90s’ more garish styles as simply tacky or ugly is to miss some of what was most interesting about fashion during the fin-de-millénaire.
The misreading is understandable. The “spirit” of 1990s fashion can be hard to pin down. At first glance the giest of its zeit appears to have a seriously split personality. On the one hand it was the go-go 90s! Shiny boom times in aggressively bright, upbeat blouses, and pleated, stonewashed blue jeans! It was 1980s materialism on ecstasy*!
On the other hand, there was, as Caroline Evans describes in Fashion at the Edge, “a preoccupation with representations of death, trauma, alienation, and decay.” Her book explores things like heroin chic, and the macabre Victoriana produced by designers like Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Grunge style, too, is associated with the darker, end-of-days mood of the decade. Nothing mattered because nothing meant anything anymore. It used to. But now? …fuck it…
This schizophrenia makes sense, though. We’re also talking about the decade when postmodernity went mainstream. Recall that the century ended with Ted Theodore Logan donning a black trench coat and beating the crap out of the “desert of the real”. Fragmentation, alienation, bricolage, pastiche, kitsch. These were the name of the game.
In various ways, all of these descriptions of the 1990s zeitgeist resonate with my friends’ and my experiences of the time, and yet they also miss something important: the simultaneous sense of playfulness, fun, irony, and ambivalence that characterized our responses to fashion, identity, and mass culture.
Come back in time with me: It is a time before ebay, as well as a time when even cheap clothes are expensive by early 21st century standards. You’re young and you’re poor. There’s supposedly an economic boom happening somewhere – but it always seems to happen to someone else. Someone horrible and soulless. You can’t afford The Gap and that makes you proud and also kind of pissed off. But in the absence of online auctions, thrift and vintage shops are overflowing with the detritus of previous decades, all jumbled together – a 1950s circle skirt, alongside 1970s hip-huggers buried beneath a stack of five-year-old brightly patterned, cable-knit sweaters. You dig and dig trying to find some elusive badge of authenticity, but you can’t find it. And new ideas from the street are instantly co-opted, branded and sold. None of it means anything. And that matters to you. And you can’t help but feel like the baby boomers are somehow to blame. (PS You are not wrong)
So what do you do? How do you look?
Here are two typical outfits:
Outfit 1: An old plaid wool Pendelton jacket pilfered from a friend’s dad’s closet, a shin-length brown, floral dress (purchased new!), Frye work boots that you scored in a way you’d rather not discuss (it will continue to haunt you 20 years later), and an Iron Maiden baseball cap you found on the street and may or may not have washed before wearing. Your “purse” is a Beverly Hills 90210 lunch box that you have covered with discontinued stickers from the head shop you work at. The stickers say things like “Still Crazy After All These Beers” and “Party Naked.” Your lipstick is dark purple or brown (you don’t wear any other make-up.)
Outfit 2: A pink, taffeta slip from the 1950s that you’ve trimmed with black velvet, a men’s black, velvet dinner jacket, a pink rhinestone headband and a sparkly choker. You are definitely wearing body glitter and your hair is twisted into messy Björk buns with random tendrils dangling in your face. You’re wearing the same boots. You wear those boots with everything. They’re worth more than your rent.
But here is the thing: neither of these outfits is actually meant to look “good” in any traditional glossy magazine approved sense. I mean, they kind of are, but they’re also totally not. You are being ironic. The first outfit is a hodge-podge of gender, class, sub-cultural and historical signs that negate or contradict each other. It’s purposefully confusing unless you know the code. The second is a hyperbolic performance of normative gender that shows up conventions as ridiculous. There is angst in both outfits, sure, but there is also a lot of fun.
It was fun to sift through the bargain bin of history and pick and choose our fashion signs based on the day’s haul. We were literally “making fun” of fashion. And if you think it was just me and my arty Pacific Northwest cohort, re-watch what we would have considered our opposite: the Spice Girls movie. Same basic principles apply.
To be fair, it was my decade to be young, so of course I think it was special. But in retrospect, because it was self-consciously apolitical, I’m also aware that our embrace of irony was a profoundly ineffective form of rebellion that made it all too easy for the ugliest parts of society to thrive. Sorry millennials. That was our bad.
When I started teaching style and cultural studies almost a decade ago, I was fascinated to discover that the majority of my students had zero interest in, and were in fact totally confused by the concept of irony in general and dressing ironically in particular. I want to blame Alanis Morrisette, but I think it’s just that these students were earnest. I remember a young man asking incredulously, “So, it’s like choosing to wear a shirt because you think it’s ugly?” and thinking I finally understood what it was like to stand on the other side of a generation gap. My sense though is that this is changing. As 1990s fashion inevitably continues to resurge (because that is how it works, Allure) its spirit is being renewed, but with an encouraging twist. In my next post I consider how some contemporary street styles are reviving irony and “making fun” of fashion in a way that attempts to actually politicize their transgressions.
*Note for the youths. As I understand it, what is now referred to as “molly” is the same as what used to be called “ecstasy.” What is now called ecstasy was called “getting ripped-off.”
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