Now-stalgia - why fashion is going back to the future

 

J Lo looking familiar in S/S2020 Versace

Last September, Jennifer Lopez closed Milan’s spring/summer Versace show, shimmering down the catwalk like some A-list whirling dervish, in a sheer jungle-print scarf dress. It was the same sheer scarf dress that she wore on the red carpet of the 2000 Grammys which wowed for the fact it looked like it would disintegrate and fall off her body at any moment. As the fashion critic Robin Givhan wrote at the time: “It was revealing without revealing anything. It dazzled because it threatened to slip away at any moment.” (It also made the term, ahem, “tit tape” go viral).

Nineteen years later, the dress had a different sort of meaning. As she slid down the catwalk to the flashes of 100 iPhones, Lopez was winning Milan fashion week. Here was a strong and confident woman of a certain age, defying stereotypes. But, as a cultural moment it also crystallised an idea that swept through fashion month: fashion is not just stuck in the past, it is in bed with it, snuggling up nice and close and rubbing its cold feet on it.

In Paris, in the same month, the 33-year-old Olivier Rousteing opened his Balmain show with Lindsay Lohan’s 2004 song Rumours (the show also featured 00s classics from Britney Spears, ‘NSync and Christina Aguilera). In the show notes, Rousteing asked: “Is my generation’s nostalgia for our turn-of-the-century childhood culture somehow less cool than fashion’s more familiar fixation on the 70s and 80s?”

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