Gen Z: Fashion Pioneers or Criminals that Need to be Brought to Justice?
An old millennial no one asked weighs in
I’ve never considered myself a master of the sartorial arts. In fact, in high school, one could justly identify me as a member of the sartorially challenged. Close your eyes and I’ll try and paint you a visual of sixteen year old Alexander: black Vans sneakers, hair ossified to a gelled, titanium hard crispness, baggy jeans with a BDSM superfluity of studded belts, wallet chains, and other pieces of “I’m edgy” metal, no less than ten Che Guevara shirts, and, for some reason, a puka choker I thought women would find attractive (they didn’t, as my pristine, untouched-until-college-penis can attest).
In fairness it was the early aughts, a time when Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank delineated fashion trends, and the stylistic horrors of Nu metal — along with what last gasps of mid-nineties grunge remained — were all the rage.
In other words, it was a terrible time to be alive, fashion wise. I cringe, as suppose we all must, when I look at pictures of myself from back then: spiky haired, cocaine skinny, enough grease on my face to deep fry a corn dog. And yet I was part of other, equally shiny-faced, unattractively styled sixteen year olds — like any generation assured of our own greatness, dismissive of anyone old enough to have a mortgage, the anointed inheritors of a bold new age. They say ignorance is bliss, and there is no ignorance blissfully greater than the collective, solipsistic ignorance of ascendant youth.
Sifting through the fashion atrocities of those years, (like actual, physical photographs) I was reminded that at least there was a fashion, awful as that fashion was — a thru line that marked you as belonging to a certain group, if not an entire generation. At least you could point to that group, with their puka necklaces and Hot Topic tees and ass-crack-revealing Abercrombie jeans, and you could say “Hey look, stupid millennials”. There was a connecting sameness among the horror, a common thread stitching together our collective bad taste.
Now? Hells bells where does a befuddled geezer begin. Gen-Z has basically transformed me into Gran Torino Clint Eastwood, scowling at children from his front porch as they pass him on the street. Every time I leave my condo and dare wander into parts of town where “the youth” congregate — the beloved bars and cafes of my own, formerly glorious youth — I feel like some freshly escaped convict, emancipated after decades of confinement into some strange, brave new world. An XXL button-up with khaki short shorts and Crocs with socks? Mom jeans with a cropped hoodie and neon green Oakleys? What’s happening? And why do all those dudes on the corner — what with their billowy jeans, roomy white Reeboks, baseball caps, and bomber jackets large enough to go paragliding in — look like a roving gang of George Kastanzas?
I look one way and think “Oh, the 90’s are back.” then another: “Oh, so are the 80’s…” then another: “…and the 70’s…” and then my visual sweep lands on a girl who looks like a cross between You’ve Got Mail Meg Ryan and Blade Runner Sean Young, with a dash of House of Pain thrown into the mix, and I’m lost.
As Jump Around starts scratching across my rattled, senescent millennial brain, I look down at my skinny jeans, neatly cuffed, and my cherished pair of Clarks boots, properly sized for my feet, and my fitted plaid long sleeve shirt, rolled to my elbows, and I think: are these kids fucking crazy, or I have I just become a basic bitch?
Before I can answer I catch the gaze of a homeless man beside me, about my age, and dressed in a disturbingly similar outfit, and my worst fears are seemingly confirmed. We’ve been passed friend, he seems to say, with his weary, thousand yard stare, we’re no longer the trendsetters, the world has become a strange, unknowable place, where humans seek clothing that makes no attempt to fit their bodies, where it’s perfectly acceptable to move through life dressed in athletic pajamas. Come friend, sit with me beside the entrance of this Starbucks, and let us ponder better times, a time of skinny jeans and manicured beards, when keffiyehs and fedoras and suspenders without purpose reigned supreme. Also if you have five bucks that’d be great.
I’m being a bit disingenuous. Aggressive bagginess, bold colors, a superabundance of cargo pockets in places they don’t belong — Gen-Z are as easily identifiable as any preceding generation. It’s just that the stylistic attributes identifying theirs seem to stand in direct opposition to what fashion — or at least my admittedly naïve notion of fashion — is supposed to be: clothing that flatters the wearer. I may need a stronger contact lens prescription, but from what I can see, if there is one overarching theme connecting the fashion of Gen-Z, it is a generalized, all around…ill-fittingness.
I’m not talking about selective, tastefully executed roominess — say the swishy, wide-legged trousers of 30’s Katherine Hepburn, or the bulky windbreakers and biker jackets of 50’s James Dean, or even the garish Aloha shirts of Blue Hawaii-era Elvis. It’s lazier than that, less purposeful, more of knee-jerk rejection of the rules than a thoughtful trend with rules of its own, selective only in its purposeful seeming un-selectiveness.
Complicating matters further is that, more than any previous generation, there are countless exceptions to the rule, all as random as they are bad. For every generically lazy “I just rolled out of bed like this” ensemble I’m confronted with on the street, I spot countless antipodes: 90’s mall mom, 30’s Dust Bowl Oklahoman, Edward Scissorhands in a Shaq jersey, Charles Darwin if he became a juggalo. It’s like a bunch of sightless schizophrenics got released into the world’s biggest Salvation Army store, and there was a fire sale on everything sized husky. I’m reminded, whenever I see a Gen-Z’er in the wild, of one of those timed shopping sprees game shows used to have, where contestants grabbed as much free shit as they could in five minutes — outfits composed of a random selection of items made without rhyme or reason or regard to overall look, the end product a jumble of conflicting impulses — the external manifestation of a hurried, impulse driven, attention strained brain. You know, STYLE.
But I’m old, and taste in fashion, what qualifies as good or bad, out or in, is perhaps the most subjective of the creative arts — above all a thing of personal preference. I’ll admit that I’ve seen people wear some truly atrocious outfits with such confidence that it made me second guess my own taste, like, maybe I’m the doofus for not wearing belted jorts with crew socks and safety-vest yellow sneakers. So, with the high intention of broadening my dim fashion horizons, I decided to go straight to the source for clarity — that source being my 21 year-old cousin, Madison.
As a Gen-Z’er born in 2003, the year I graduated high school, Madison, or “Maddy” as we call her, sits in the zeitgeist of her generation — the most Gen-Z of Gen-Z’ers, Gen-Z distilled to its hyper-inclusive, gender fluid, tech-savvy essence. As such I believed she would be able to provide me a glimpse into the psychology that prompts an individual to voluntarily cover their body in such ghastly garments. It was at a family get together in the suburbs of Chicago where we talked, seated poolside in an expansive backyard filled with aunts and uncles and feral packs of buzzing, sugar addled children.
“I don’t really even think about it.”
This was her response to my question of what she thinks of her generation’s style, spoken directly to her phone screen.
“How would you describe it?”
I quickly added, feeling perhaps that the question was making too harsh a demand on her obviously divided attention: “Do you think you guys look good?”
She looked up at me with a modicum of attentiveness.
“I mean like, I dunno about dudes or whatever, but I just want to dress comfortably. Like, I don’t want to have to think about guys staring at my ass or whatever, you know?” She looked down at her shirt — a mesh, long-sleeved crop top through which a flaming pink bra was visible — but the irony didn’t seem to register. “I think you should just wear whatever makes you feel good.”
Her eyes dropped back down to her phone — a TikTok video of a fellow Gen-Z’er expounding on the virtues of a ketogenic diet — and I suddenly felt the invisible but inviolable barrier between us. I caught a fleeting glimpse of my much younger self — all those years of speaking to my parents half distracted, my eyes glued to a TV show, a video game, a decidedly internet-less, Nokia 3100 phone. I realized that my quest to understand Gen-Z fashion was a fruitless one, not because understanding was out of reach, but because it didn’t really matter what I thought. I was old, and my opinion, passionate though it may me, ultimately held little sway, because it had been rendered moot, obsolete, irrelevant by age.
And that’s alright. I certainly wasn’t going to adopt jorts into my life now. I liked my skinny jeans. I felt good in them, comfortable, confident, and maybe, as Madison said, that’s all that really matters. Maybe Gen-Z sacrificing looks at the altar of comfort and sustainability is not a thing to make fun of, but one that should be applauded. It’s kind of brave actually when I think about it, to look so bad and care so little.
My gaze drifted to one of the ebullient pool dwellers splashing below me — a screeching, Kool-Aid lipped gremlin of a boy, bludgeoning his sister with a foam noodle. Gen-Alpha. Soon this generation would eclipse Madison’s, as hers did mine, and the whole judgy cycle of “what are you thinking with that outfit” would start all over again. But I’m keeping my skinny jeans goddammit.
