Why Tye-Dye is back in style

Stella McCartney S/S19

We have Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dazed & Confused and Clueless to thank for the on-screen portrayal of the indolent renegade, which went mainstream during the 1990s. Save for Hunter S. Thompson’s alter-ego Raoul Duke or The Dude, the ‘slacker’ is typically the well-liked sidekick or a zeitgeisty plot device, rather than the protagonist. “Loadies [druggies] generally hang on the grassy knoll over there,” Cher Horowitz explains when schooling Tai Frasier in how avoid being a social outcast.

The psychotropic dresser who populated that same grassy knoll could be identified by their shorn-off baggy pants, dress-length T-shirts, jaunty headgear and abundant tie-dye – a uniform that the catwalk has largely ignored, until now. The ‘dropout’s’ colourfully wayward fashion tenets began to infiltrate Prada and Stella McCartney last year, with the tie-dye trend now a mainstay of new generation labels Collina Strada, Eckhaus Latta and Ambush. But why, in our ‘like’-orientated culture which is ordinarily about cultivating the appearance of success, are we choosing to adopt a dropout dress code?

Tie-dye was a key component of the “stoner” wardrobe, as seen in 1995's Clueless

Our first question for Yoon Ahn – the creative polymath who is one half of Japanese label Ambush (and the mind behind Kim Jones’ Dior Homme jewellery line) – was how are the counterculture/stoner/surf roots of tie-dye relevant now? “They represented freedom and not abiding by social code,” she says. “We all want to feel free deep down inside. Perhaps a tie dye T-shirt can give us that feeling.” Her own tie-dye T-shirts are part of the aspirational wardrobe of the twenty-something global intelligentsia. Why does she feel that tie-dye has resonated with a new generation? “Nostalgia,” she suggests, and “a bit of liberation from controlled digital images”.

She has a point. The mass popularity of the modern tie-dyed ‘scumbro’ look, famously spearheaded by Justin Bieber (and channeled into his fashion line, Drew House) is part of the same cultural shift that’s brought the intentionally hazy aesthetic of fashion photographer and filmmaker Sharna Osborne into the luxury arena, where flawless digital imagery is no longer all that inspiring. If blurry photography is a backlash to Instagram’s airbrushed norms, sun-faded psychedelic tie-dye translates the anti-perfection stance into our wardrobes.


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