streeter:

I went snowboarding a few weeks ago.  I know, very cool.  As I stood in the lift line, surrounded by kids much younger and much cooler, I was overcome by deja vu.  I hadn’t seen any of these kids before, nor had I been to this mountain, but it all felt so familiar.  It wasn’t until later in the day, when I stopped at a snowboard store, that I realized why everything on the mountain seemed familiar: it was the clothing. 

I had gone to the snowboard store with the intention of looking at new boards and pretending to know what I was talking about - “Now, I heard the laminate on the new Burtons isn’t great in icy conditions.  Have you heard that?” - but instead wandered into the apparel section.  That’s when it hit me: these colors, these patterns, everything about the cool snowboarding gear on sale was the same as it had been in the early 90’s.  Neon greens and yellows, Saved-By-The-Bell-Esque patterns on hot pink jackets, I had seen, and worn, all of this before.

And we will see all of it again, in twenty years, because it appears to me that cool kid fashion is always looking back and ironically borrowing from that which was popular twenty years ago.  Think about it, in the early aughts did the cool kids not look eerily similar to the cool kids in the early 80’s?  Did they not wear Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirts? It’s not an exact science, of course, but I remember seeing The Strokes on TV in 2001 and thinking, “Huh, they look like The Ramones.”  So it is with some confidence I say that popular fashion is on a 20 year loop.  And what does that mean for you cool kids? 

It means things are going to get real ugly, real soon.

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