There’s no question that the 1990s have recently become the go-to decade in fashion’s ever-shifting flowchart of self-reference. Some examples? Well, sticking with menswear, consider the logo sweats at Calvin for Spring 2014, or the Maharishi-touched souvenir jackets that were everywhere for Spring 2016, or the glossed-up sized-down grunge at Hedi-age Saint Laurent. Then note the revival across tailoring’s pantheon of the looser-panted suit—which as yet, praise be, has not been accompanied by the high-collared, broad-shouldered three-button jacket of the variety favored by Chandler in Friends (but watch this space). For the musically inclined (vinyl, please—let’s just delete the MiniDisc), nod your head in nostalgic recognition of the Madchester homage at The Soloist’s Spring 2016 collection, put your hands in the air for the several-season Moschino-led flashback to semantically literal clubwear, then down a pint of mild in honor of new Gucci’s gender-decoding riff on Jarvis Cocker’s Pulp-peak thrift shop elegance. Skateboarding is mainstream cool again—even at Coach, for heaven’s sake—and Stussy sells big time at Urban Outfitters. Somehow we find ourselves back in the day when people said “back in the day” entirely without irony.
How did this happen? Why then, again, now? One straightforward-ish answer is that it’s all a matter of timing. Members of Generation X spent the 1990s in their teens and 20s, grappling with dial-up. Now in their 40s—or thereabouts—graduates of that generation are helming high-influence houses from Alexander McQueen to Zegna. The same goes for Givenchy, Saint Laurent, Valentino, Gucci, and a whole heap besides. And whether consciously or not, it’s only natural for designers (not to mention stylists, editors, and the rest of the fashion diaspora) to mine the time—back in the day—in which they spent their defining years. This theory, though, needs an unreality check. For the fashion industry’s 2015 evocation of the 1990s is about as accurate as Back to the Future Part II’s evocation of 2015 (although, wait—they actually have invented a working hoverboard). And that’s because rather than hacking it wholesale, the designers of today are cherry-picking a 1990s source code for Millennial consumption.
My 1990s started when I was 15 and living in London. Fashion-wise—if you could ever call what I wear fashion—that decade saw me bound from pre-grunge goth (courtesy of The Cure and Camden) to skate and street (Triple Five Soul, Stussy, Zoo York), onto clubwear (Katharine Hamnett and Westwood tees, hemp trousers, Royal Elastics sneakers) and workwear (R.Newbold, Carhartt), graduating through to first-job Paul Smith and warehouse sale Maharishi—never embroidered. Smith apart, the closest I ever came to capital-F Fashion were the Comme pants I bought because a girlfriend said she liked them—and, naturally, magazines.
This morning I fought my way into the loft and dug out a musty old box of them: some Details, some i-D, some Sky, some Dazed, and a few issues of The Face. And what they show is just how selectively the collective memory of the 2010s is editing what the 1990s were really like. Sure, some things chime: In a great 1993 Details (22 years on, it still smells of sample Calvin Escape, and Guess ads look exactly the same), Perry Farrell, Billy Idol, and Scott Weiland look unimpeachably right-now back-then in a shoot mixing Helmut Lang, Paul Smith, and Comme Homme Plus. From Mario Sorrenti to Guido Palau, most male fashion insiders profiled in an i-D 1995 issue cited A.P.C. as their own everyday label of choice. Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Alexander McQueen? Everywhere.
These, though, are among the few perennial evergreens in a faded landscape of dimly recalled, long-decommissioned zeitgeists: The Wannabe loafer, Duffer of St George, Mossimo, Garbage, even Chuck Norris modeling for Right Guard in a judo suit—all these and so very many more have fallen, barely lamented, by the wayside. But no matter: That’s cultural Darwinism at work. The 1990s are now long enough gone to feel alluringly exotic to a new generation—a distance that is only emphasized by the portcullis of pre-digital, pre-Millennial separation that divides them from then. Meanwhile, we wizened, misty-eyed graduates of back-in-the-day remember, relish, and creatively rehash the best of it. Which is why the nineties are back, same but different.
The post The ’90s May Be Back, but Menswear Looks Different This Time Around appeared first on Vogue.