Gen Z continues to mine Y2K and early-aughts aesthetics impossibly hard (Victoria’s Secret, Uggs, Hunter boots), but eventually they’ll run out of millennial trends to resurrect. I’m curious to see if they’ll then reach back to the ‘90s (or even earlier?) or if they’ll start nostalgizing their own pandemic-era experiences.

So the fevered search for the next ever-more-niche revival could be seen as a way for Gen Z to carve out a IYKYK (“if you know, you know”) point of difference and ring-fence a specific look, community or interest. For a limited time, anyway.

Gen-Z has inverted the design process — aesthetics like Barbiecore, Cottagecore, Dark Academia and Coastal Grandma originated bottoms-up from social media and resale platform content instead of top-down from fashion brands and retailers. As a result, many Gen-Zers tend to adapt pieces representative of trends into their own personal styles, as

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