Now I have a question...

[tigeranne]

Why does the entire Internet seem to think that the 90s ended in 1992?

If you google "90s fashion," all you get is images of stuff that carried over from the 80s, and disappeared quickly as grunge took over casual fashion. It's like no one remembers the last 7 years of the decade, for some reason.

When I think of 90s fashion, the first thing that comes to mind is earth colours and muted palettes. Olive green, grey, brown, beige, baby blue, off-white and mustard yellow. Orange actually being the new black, for a periode between 93-95. Pink being outlawed, along with belts. Dark denim. Extremely fine-wale cordury. Un-bleached linen. Low-rise, bootcut jeans. Button fly or laces instead of zippers. Plaid flannel shirts. Striped, rib-knit henleys and t-shirts. Spaghetti strap tops. Biker and combat boots. Floral button-down dresses worn with big shoes. Thin, cropped cardigans. Layered polo-shirts. Bucket hats. Everyone cutting their hair in layered styles like Jennifer Aniston, and/or dyeing it red like Claire Danes.

Anyone else remember this?

Comments

[sammyfrog.livejournal.com]

Certainly I do! The 90s was the last decade in which I didn't hate EVERY fashion. X) I think people mainly concentrate on the ugliest bits as examples for every decade because they're the most memorable. (Twenty years from now they'll be hard pressed to figure out what that is for THIS decade, IMO!) I don't remember the 80s being nearly as ugly as it's portrayed. After all, men used to wear pants that fit, and you could admire their nice derrieres! :D I never thought I'd see anything uglier than the pants five times too big and hanging halfway down the hips with the boxer shorts showing, but the tight legs and saggy ass combo is definitely worse!

[tigerannesims2.livejournal.com]

I have fond memories of early 2000s fashions, actually. You were allowed to wear belts and pink again! :D I had so many pink and purple tops back in college. x)

It's not the clothes that bother me about the current aesthetic trends, it's the fact that everyone and their grandmother are getting large, permanent tattoos. Guys, they don't wash off. In 10 years time, when the next generation makes a rebellion, having plain, untattooed skin is probably going to be a beauty ideal.

Pants are now tied with a belt around the top of the thighs, with the underwear proudly displayed in full. I wonder what the next stage will be. Knees?

[sammyfrog.livejournal.com]

Ugh, tattoos and piercings are a HUGE turn-off for me, def. Coupled with the awful, baggy clothes, not to mention the unkempt hair, it's really no wonder I'm still single. XD

MK'la is a bad influence on me. I'm starting to not care if I'm spelling correctly!

[laridian.livejournal.com]

I miss a lot of the 80s fashions, including skinny ties and fitting clothes, and the bright colors. Dreary colors and grunge were very depressing.

But all decades have some overlap. Like, WW2 had carryover for several years after 1945, and the 1950s really lasted until about 1963 in terms of styles and fashions. The 1960s, a lot of people immediately think "hippie", but that didn't get started until 1966 earliest, and didn't really get going until 1967... and lasted for several years into the 1970s.

What I mostly remember from the 1990s is grunge and flannel.

I really don't like low-rise jeans though. I guess it's leftover from when I grew up, but I prefer a higher waist on my jeans and pants, and low-rise feels uncomfortable and wrong.

[tigerannesims2.livejournal.com]

I actually feel oposite about 80s vs 90s fashion. x) Flannel and earth-tones take me back to the happiest times in my life. Everything that has the "90s aesthetic" reminds me of good things. The 80s look mostly reminds me of things I was constantly told was bad or dangerous to children, such as teenagers. :P

80s cartoons were from the satelite dishes, and had addictive powers over children. VHS taught teenagers how to KILLLLLL people. Especially old ladies. Teenagers in the 80s loved killing them. We knew, because adults we knew had seen it depicted in TV dramas. (But those were on the state channel, so they were safe to watch.) Music videos could make you stupid, allegedly. And narcotics. It had something to do with drugs. "Boys don't LIKE that music, they listen to it because of peer pressure." Boys with mullets were most likely violent to kids smaller than them. Video game consoles were literally a crime against nature.

I'm not joking, I spent around 25 years of my life being very relieved that I wasn't a teen in the super-dangerous 80s. x) To be fair though, there were a LOT of young people killed in car accidents in the 70s and 80s, because getting a driver's license was a lot easier. Children were run over, because people couldn't really drive. In the 80s, the drug deaths also started mounting. It was still a problem when I was in high-school, but by then it had gone from "We are powerless to stop this," to "You can choose not to do this stupid thing."

I love low-rise jeans, but I never wore the extreme kind that was briefly popular in the early 2000s. When you need to do a Brazillian wax, so your bikini line doesn't pop up from your jeans, your pants may be riding too low.

[lollipoplegacy.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. I grew up in the 90's and its hard to find a lot of stuff on Ebay from when I was a child. Now a days the 90's toys and stuff would be collectibles but back then they were just new. Tamagotchi's are back and they are like 50-60 dollars and I think as a adult back in 97 when they came out and I had to have one...now I am like "what was the hype"

[tigerannesims2.livejournal.com]

I almost bought a Tamagochi for my birthday, in 1997. The main reason I didn't, was that all they had left were chickens, and I wanted a cat or dog. They were $100, I think! I didn't want to pay that much for a pixel chicken!

[lollipoplegacy.livejournal.com]

LOL my dad went to 3 different stores in Chicago in 97 to find ONE Tamagotchi for me. I lost it a few months later...I wouldn't be surprised that he paid 100 dollars for it.

[holaspis.livejournal.com]

A bit of central-European 90s kid perspective: I remember most of those things perfectly, but some of them only arrived where I live in early 2000s. For example - laced pants were only a thing around the same time coloured sunglasses were, button flys definitely started earlier though. And when bucket hats arrived, it was already something lame.
What I remember the best is denim. Lots of denim. Everything denim (I even had a denim pencil case). Short-sleeved turtlenecks and spaghetti straps in tops and dresses, sometimes all worn together. And cargo pants.
And I wonder if you had something like what we did: in late nineties it was possible to buy safety pins in other colors than silver. We used to pin lots of them everywhere on our jeans, mostly on parties or some bigger outings. I actually still like this look.

[tigerannesims2.livejournal.com]

I remember the coloured sunglasses! Pink and green were the big colours around here. :) That was definitely in the early '00s. :) My best friend back then had a pink pair with a little glitter heart on one side. x)

Around the same time, we made bracelets out of safety pins and beads. I still have two of them, that I made right before college.

I forgot to put cargo-pants in the post. x) Remember the draw-string ones, from the 98-03 era?

[holaspis.livejournal.com]

Around here pink or yellow were seen the most. I had a pink pair - to go with red hair and leather jacket. So it must have been 00's - you're right about the ban on pink.

I do! But those came back around 2008, in an "envirronment friendly" incarnation (supposedly made out of recycled fabric). And looking at skinny jeans surrounding me now, I wish came back again.

I wonder... Were the safety pins part of grunge style? Or was it more generally rebellious? I just realized we sort of never had true grunge music - most of our 90's mainstream had arisen from underground punk rock scene, and then people turned to hip-hop in what seemed like a fortnight.

[tigerannesims2.livejournal.com]

The safety pin bracelets weren't seen as particularly rebellious. If I remember correctly, the early 00s didn't really have angry, woke young people, the way this decade has. It had angry, frightened conservative people and sad, disillusioned liberals. The bracelets were more of an arts and crafts DIY thing.

I come from the land of corpse paint and lyrics consisting entirely of wovels and the letter "r." At least that's the music we're known for exporting. x) It's not mainstream even here, so our taste in music is very Americanized.