In 1998, Britney Spears ruled the airwaves, Sex and the City was the hottest new show on TV and Ginger Spice and co laced up their Union flag platform boots to clamber to box office glory. In 2018, Spears is fronting a major fashion campaign, a Sex and the City star is running for public office and the most hotly anticipated album release on the horizon is from (wait for it...) the Spice Girls.
Hang on, what year is it again? Echoes of 1998 are so strong that anyone with even the most glancing relationship with fashion and culture could be forgiven for experiencing a touch of deja vu.
Blame Spears et al. The singer, who released ...Baby One More Time in 1998, is the face and body of Kenzo’s SS18 La Collection Momento. In Peter Lindbergh’s campaign images, she wears logo cropped sweatshirts, logo baseball caps, a denim bikini, a baby backpack and other pieces that reference her debut decade.
In other news straight out of ‘98, Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda Hobbes in SATC, entered the New York gubernatorial race. The actor and activist is facing off against multi-term incumbent Andrew Cuomo, campaigning on the issues of improving education and the subway system.
And get ready for even more spice: 20 years after Spice World grossed £54 million (Dh277.8 million) at the box office, the Spice Girls are set for the release of a new greatest hits album and an animated superhero film.
On the SS18 runways, ‘90s staples such as slip dresses, crop tops, stretch velvet, mini-kilts and tracksuit bottoms abounded. Miuccia Prada revived her bestselling nylon handbags, and at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld showed clear PVC boots and handbags — direct nods to the decade’s jelly sandals and micro-bags.
Donatella Versace hit the point home by turning her collection into a tribute to brother Gianni Versace, whose July 1997 slaying left the fashion house on everyone’s lips into and beyond 1998. (For more late-’90s Versace-nalia, see The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.)
“The ‘90s were a clear influence on a large portion of designers this season,” says Ida Petersson, womenswear buying director at Brownsfashion.com. “There’s so much I almost feel like I’m reliving my youth.” In 1998, she had just moved to the UK and recalls running around east London in her beloved paint-splattered Helmut Lang jeans.
“The newest generation of designers today grew up in the ‘90s and the older generation would have been in their early 20s, so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that at a time of change they’re feeling nostalgic.”
At least part of the allure of ‘90s style lies in its inherent comfort. Slip dresses, Lang, trainers — nothing from the decade was as awkward or constraining as the killer heels and low-rise jeans that would follow in the Noughties.
It also helps that distance and perspective have winnowed away the era’s more ridiculous aspects. We’re left looking at 1998 through (tiny, rimless) rose-coloured glasses, and what we see is a gentler time — when designers had more autonomy because they owned their brands. When celebrities dared to leave home without consulting stylists. When there was no Instagram (it would have left us rolling our eyes after a single SATC episode), and fashion magazines were booming.
After 20 years, cultural references and fashions from 1998 qualify as vintage. “I completely embrace the ‘90s as officially vintage,” says Cameron Silver, founder of LA’s Decades, the luxury vintage boutique frequented by Michelle Williams and Nicole Kidman.
Among the 1998 pieces currently in his inventory are a Gianni Versace couture backless evening gown, and he cites original Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela pieces as “valuable and extremely interesting” to his clients. “It also looks fresh to younger shoppers who weren’t alive in the ‘90s.”
Therein lies a crucial distinction: 1998 style tends to best suit those too young to remember coveting Spears’s schoolgirl look the first time around. Just look at Kaia Gerber, whose denim cutoffs and crop tops are very original Britney.
As someone who’s been there, done that and endured the blisters from more than one pair of jelly sandals, the idea of 1998 rising makes me cringe... Yet I’m writing this story wearing a pastel-pink crushed-velvet skirt — not vastly dissimilar to the lilac velour dress I wore for part of my bat mitzvah in 1997. It’s only natural that younger millennials and Gen Z-ers should idealise fashion eras they missed, but shouldn’t we have moved on?
Silver’s advice is not to take anything too literally. “I have a very strict philosophy about wearing vintage: Ask yourself, ‘Does this look modern?’” he says. “No one wants to look like a walking anachronism, so rather than dressing like an extra from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, take something from the past and make it look like the future” — say, mixing a late-‘90s blazer with chic joggers from The Row.
Petersson plans to update the look for 2018 by wearing her mini-kilt with a hoodie rather than a crop top. “If you were around the first time, maybe avoid the head-to-toe look,” she says. “But there are so many grown-up ways to wear this trend [that] there’s a way for everyone to reference it.”
You know what that means — bring on the Buffalo trainers.
