The Tamesis
If I close my eyes and think about it, I can remember the nineties, the decade I was born. My mother made the home phone call. The smell of cigarette smoke. Weird, colorful overalls. Tap on the TV so the antenna picks up eastenders. Before, people would drop by uninvited and leave notes through the letterbox if we weren’t around. Although I don’t remember much, I do remember that the idea of being “perceived” was limited to the mirror and the people around me. It wasn’t until later, like around 2014, that life started to look like what it would eventually become.
The obsession with the ’90s has been fueled in part by Ryan Murphy’s huge success in recent months. love story. Women everywhere (myself included) are eager to buy Levi’s 517 and oval sunglasses. Sales of Cartier tanks are up, and stars are wearing slip dresses and strappy heels. While this passion is focused on style, I do think it’s about much more than that. We long for a different time; a more relaxed world where people went to parties and didn’t have phones. In the past, when people met lovers in bars, no one would say “looks handsome” or anything like that, and no one would get plastic surgery at the age of 27.
Photo: New York Daily News Archives/Getty Images
It’s easy to see why we want to escape this very specific snapshot in time. This is sex and city It was a time when people made a lot of money working as columnists or fashion PR. Even in London and New York, apartments are cheap. People were going to buzzy magazine launches and hanging out at each other’s homes for no apparent reason. The 90s saw the advent of third wave feminism and the riots; being a traditional wife was the uncoolest thing in the world. In many ways, the culture of that decade was the polar opposite of today’s culture. While it’s become a cliché to romanticize the past and then question why we did it the way we did—and, of course, the ’90s were no utopia—it’s impossible to separate our current fascination with the ’90s from a love that goes deeper than wedges.
I do wonder, though, if the essence of what we’re after is so far removed from the way we live around the world today. While legions of TikTok users offer masterclasses on how to dress like CBK, they forget that she doesn’t want to be noticed. She didn’t think about whether her actions were “fancy.” previous real housewives A good friend of CBK, Carole Radziwill, recently Live with Deuxmoi About how much enthusiasm surrounds Caroline misses the point. “She pulled her hair back with a hair tie because she didn’t want to wash it every day,” she said. “She did what came naturally to her and wore what she felt comfortable in and what was closest to herself. Mainly jeans, button-downs and T-shirts. The point wasn’t to copy her style; the point was to do and wear what was truest to you. Be yourself. She was who she was.”
In fact, I think a lot of what we think of as minimalism in the ’90s was probably about people relaxing and enjoying themselves and not thinking so hard about what they were wearing, or how they were perceived by others. People in the club wear baggy T-shirts and Converse shoes because they want to dance. Stars show up on red carpets wearing jeans and smoking cigarettes because it’s about the movies. Minimalism without freedom is just simplicity; minimalism without freedom is just simplicity. Without the latter, the former is useless. It feels weird and a little frustrating to have social media influencers spread the same minimalist images of the ’90s via algorithms, when the essence of the matter is some kind of indifference or looseness – not just aesthetically, but spiritually.
