2003 Unbearable: Y2K Fashion is More Problematic than You Remember

As a middle schooler, I was distinctly not in charge of how I envisioned myself, merely receiving and processing information about how I should look, dress, and act. My classmates and I started to see who was hewing toward conventional views of femininity—and who wasn’t. I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand what was going on, but I could feel the anxiety of expectation, yet another form of people-pleasing.

When everyone more or less adheres to the same trends, the notion of “who wore it best” becomes harshly visible. This external pressure to compete was made worse by the fact that the low-rise, form-fitting silhouettes put the body on display. With the return of these styles, a recent article declared that abs are now an “accessory” (“cleavage is over.”), an indication that these clothes implore the wearer to mold their body to fit the clothes. The tiny clothes could also be infantilizing; most t-shirts were literally called “baby tees” (my friend, Marcy, calls this aesthetic “sexy baby” à la Taylor Swift). Professor Kelly Colvin, a historian of gender and fashion at the University of Massachusetts, notes that, when looking back on these experiences, “the same tension remains, the amount of pressure that you face, either in terms of shaping your body in a specific way or knowing that you’re going to be critiqued if your body doesn’t look a certain way.”

“We talk about this [in history] but is fashion the marker or the maker of societal trends?” queries Colvin. The 2000s were the era in which Britney Spears began her conservatorship, Paris Hilton was the victim of Revenge Porn, and the media seemed to take inexhaustible pleasure in calling women fat. The media dictated and distributed what Constance Grady has called “Bubblegum Misogyny,” when a supposedly post-feminist society taught us that “there was no right way to be a girl. There were only different ways to fail.” The clothing of this period cannot be separated from that background thrum of misogyny—and my inability to combat it as a tween.