Britney and Bennifer. Cristiano Ronaldo at Manchester United. A new series of Sex and the City. Trucker caps and dresses with peekaboo cutouts. Wait, is it 2021, or 2003?
The noughties are back. Don’t blame me: this isn’t just a fashion thing – it is celebrity culture, TV and even football. Also, do not confuse “the noughties are back” with “the noughties are cool again”, because the two are quite different. When something is ripe for pop culture nostalgia, that means it is ancient history.
Being old enough to remember the actual noughties does not make you any kind of oracle on the noughties revival, because our memories are not the point here. The generation leading this particular revival are reliving memories of their own – childhood ones of their mums picking them up from school in Juicy Couture tracksuits, or of the formative night they came downstairs in their jimjams and saw Christina Aguilera in chaps on late night MTV. “I was there” doesn’t make you hip, it just makes you old.
Were the noughties actually any good, though? Do they warrant a revival? The gold-script name necklaces were solid, to be fair. But if there is glory in cargo pants and Ugg boots, it is as holy relics of the last days of a life that wasn’t ruled by phones and social media. The noughties are the bridge between the pre-internet era, and the life we live now.
I remember the day the Guardian gave me a BlackBerry – Google it, kids! – and I walked down the street clicking out emails on my little keypad and, wow, I mean as far as I was concerned I was literally Hillary Clinton. Look at me! I’m so busy. I’m so important! Funny to think that after all the panic about the millennium bug, when New Year’s Day dawned in 2000 and the clocks were still ticking and the aeroplanes hadn’t fallen out of the sky, we thought that Y2K had been a false alarm and embedding technology into the frontal cortex of our brains hadn’t destroyed civilisation after all.
Two decades later, it feels more and more as if the Y2K doomsayers had a point. Technology did kind of crash our culture; it just didn’t happen on the stroke of midnight.
Noughties fashion is not an easy look to wear as an adult. I don’t plan my outfits around my bedazzled belly button ring, and I’m guessing that you don’t either. Oh, and the colours! All bubblegum pinks and mermaid aquas, like a six-year-old girl’s bedroom.
But there are some nice bits we can cherry-pick. Gucci designer Alessandro Michele told me recently that he thought Tom Ford’s era at the house, which ended in 2004, was “magical”. All slouchy trousers and corset tops, pencil skirts and silk trenchcoats, those clothes look like the 90s, but hotter. (Don’t take my word for it: TikTok superstar Addison Rae wore 2003 Tom Ford for Gucci to the Met Gala this year.) And I’m willing to overlook the decade’s hideous frameless sunglasses if it means a green light to spaghetti-strap vest tops, which I still prefer to T-shirts, if I’m honest, despite camisoles having been unfashionable for two decades.
What’s more, the noughties gave good handbag. The Dior Saddle bag, introduced in 2000, was lightweight enough to slot neatly between your arm and your ribcage. In a cashless age of travelling light, maybe we can swap the super-practical cross-body for an old-school shoulder bag. You know, next time.
