Fashion Comedown
Nina Weir
Looking back through the trends of the last decade, they’re as hard to view as one cohesive body as the YouTube recommendations on a shared family computer. There is one irrevocable fact though: we had some absolute shockers. Getting through the trends of the last ten years was a feat of human spirit worth a Hollywood blockbuster. In a show of resilience, we survived through 10 years of side fringes, mullet skirts, cracked nail polish and put-through-a-paper-shredder ripped jeans. To finish up the decade, I want to review the most infamous trends we wore, if for nothing else, to prove to my children that we were in fact self-aware of how bad we looked in high school.
Leggings
I don’t care how many fashion sites or influencers do paid partnerships with athleisure brands, I will never accept leggings as a fashion piece. Blame it on Supré’s aggressive ad campaign for jeggings or maybe blame it on the galaxy printed Black Milk leggings worn to every 15th birthday party in 2014; but that item has lost all credibility as anything associated with fashion. Leggings have a time and a place. That time: Sunday night at 11pm. That place: standing in your driveway meeting your UberEats delivery driver.
Neon
Like an ageing reality TV star, neon has survived throughout the 10s, adapting from one equally awful form to another. Beginning as a scene-kid staple, the colour jumped from clip-in hair extensions, to Jay Jays skinny jeans, to Warehouse activewear, to the bodycon dresses and bikinis worn on every Love Island episode. Like low waisted jeans and baker boy hats, wearing neon looks less Kardashian and more Kath and Kim levels of tacky.
Flower crowns
Nothing says teen angst in the 2010s like the flower crown. Whether you were a ukulele-playing, Vance-Joy-Riptide-covering, hashtag-wanderlust gramming bohemian; or a dark-nail-polish-wearing, black-and-white-filtered, Lana-del-Rey-stanning Tumblr girl; you owned a flower crown. While this trend was undisputedly less awful than the hair-feathers that filled Lovisa around 2012, its probability of surviving outside music festivals and costume parties in the 20s seem pretty slim.
Quirky prints
Unless you lived under a rock (or are from the South Island; essentially the same thing), you would remember the mass hysteria of moustache-printed everything. If someone can honestly provide me with an answer as to why 14-year-old girls were so obsessed with a pattern inspired by men's facial hair, I would love to know. At the moment, my leading theory is a multimillion-dollar covert advertising deal paid for by Pringles and heavily pushed by Typo—but this definitely has room for improvement. The moustache obsession was the first of many ‘quirky’ prints trends which existed over the last decade. It was followed by tacos, cacti, sloths, etc. None of which are at all explainable, reasonable, or wearable. Lets confine fun prints to socks and stationary in 2020 and call it a day.
Some other honourable mentions: 3D glasses with the lens popped out, T-shirts with any/all of the members of One Direction printed on them, dip-dyed hair, and cat-ear headbands. Rest in peace, may you forever live on in our Instagram archives and never again in our wardrobes.