Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 19, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM ● C3 TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2025 Millennials’ high school clothes are cool again FASHION-GO-ROUND P HILADELPHIA, Pa. — The secret to time travel is the camisole. Enter the portal — an Old Navy dressing room in suburban Philadel- phia — put one on, and if you are a millennial of a certain age, you’ll be transported 20 years into the past. The King of Prussia Mall is, mirac- ulously, just as we left it in the early aughts: the jeans are boot cut, baggy or wide legged. The scent of Auntie Anne’s pretzels permeates the air. The skirts have a bubble hem or a raw den- im edge or a tiered, white prairie cut. The sound system is playing Cold- play and Avril Lavigne, and Freaky Friday is back in theatres. The tops are halters and tubes, and most impor- tantly, the camisoles have a contrast lace trim. Layer as many as you can for maximum style, just like we did in high school. And, just as in high school, we are back in a mall dressing room trying on tops, which look like the very same tops we wore in high school 20-some- thing years ago because fashion and time are a flat circle, and we mil- lennials have aged into our second go-round. We recall when it happened to our mothers, when we begged for flare jeans, circa 1999. “Bell bottoms, really?” they said, with a bit of disdainful amusement. “That’s the stuff we used to wear in high school.” Mommmmm. You don’t understand. But we do now, kind of: the genera- tions after us have been looking to the 1990s and 2000s for fashion inspira- tion. The difference is that it’s being marketed to us, too. Abercrombie has ditched the soft- core marketing and logo tees in favour of elevated basics that college girlies and mid-career girlbosses alike are snapping up. Same for Gap and Old Navy, with Zac Posen at the helm. Stores that didn’t exist in the United States when millennials were in high school, such as Aritzia and Princess Polly, are copping styles from Delia*s (RIP) and Charlotte Russe. We put on the camisoles and the cropped, baggy jeans with flip flops, and examine our reflections in the sparse, white, cement-floored dressing room. We come out, look each other over and double over laughing. We are 14 all over again. But a question is gnawing at us: what sort of midlife crisis might we trigger when we try on the clothes of our carefree youth, but now with mort- gages and silvering hair and our first mammograms looming? As it turns out, the golden age of mall culture that we remember so fondly was more like its grand finale. New malls had cropped up in the United States every single year for the second half of the 20th century — and then in 2007, amid a nascent recession, none. By 2008, Newsweek was asking: Is the American shopping mall dead? What was left of brick-and-mortar shopping got further decimated in 2020. But then, right on schedule, just as the 20-year nostalgia cycle would have predicted, a newly consum- er-aged gen Z started yearning for our mall-sourced 2000s styles: the Hen- leys, the light-wash denim, the rugby shirts, the Juicy Couture sweatsuits and the Oakley sunglasses. And shopping at the mall, they quick- ly learned, got them to you even faster than the next-day delivery option online. Many of the original purveyors of these styles have lived to sell them again, some in part because they shrewdly expanded to win back millen- nial consumers as they aged into their adulthoods and careers. And thus, here we find ourselves in 2025. In a timeline where teens in baggy cargo shorts are idling away their summer weekdays in the frosty industrial AC of the mall again, dous- ing themselves with testers of Aber- crombie & Fitch Woods cologne. Unlike us, many of them roam around with devices that tattle their exact locations to their parents. Still, here they are, retracing our steps on the hunt for what we bought in the same place at the same age. Do you remember when we were teenagers, and we’d buy a hoodie or a T-shirt with numerals of a random “vintage” year on it to look cool? Well, we have some bad news for you. In Hollister, the year emblazoned across the hoodies is … 2001. The “2000s Vault” collection, re- leased this summer, features the same tiered ruffle skirts, lace-trim babydoll tops and tight cable-knit sweaters that we totally wore to that party in Zack’s parents’ basement after the football playoffs. It’s a bit of a mind warp to put them back on. This looks cute, our brains say, but maybe it’s because they have teleport- ed us back to that party, but suddenly the reverie gets interrupted when our adult bodies release a glissando of clicks and creaks as we wriggle out of said ruffle skirts. It’s the same over at the Gap, when we put on capri pants — they still make us look short, we’re sorry to re- port — and a tube top. The AOL dial-up sound. The cheerleading squad. The halter tops and lettuce-hem dress- es at Urban Outfitters. A JanSport backpack. The homecoming dance. The Henley cap sleeve T-shirt layered with a chunky belt from Lucky Brand Jeans. That first breakup. Your messy locker. The senior boys. In American Eagle, flipping through a pile of contrast-denim wide leg jeans — this was before the Sydney Sweeney ads earned internet scorn and a nod of approval from U.S. President Donald Trump — we discover that jeans now come in a triple zero, and gasp. We remember when the double zero was invented: 2006. A few of our old insecu- rities are reignited. Hollister, despite carrying larger sizes, doesn’t always have them in stock for the things we want to try. The dressing room lighting is unflattering and sallow. The Aber- crombie is closed for renovations. Throughout it all, we’re surrounded by teenage girls who are just like the teenage girls we used to be. In some ways, the younger gener- ation is wearing these trends better than we did. We remember our sub- urban high schools to be oppressively conformist — so many students wear- ing the same Abercrombie polo shirts; the same low-rise, boot-cut American Eagle jeans; coveting the same logo Coach and Burberry bags; the same Uggs; the same, the same, the same. From our 25-years-older perch, it seems like teens today are more ex- pressive and creative dressers. A few of our teenage staples have gotten chic upgrades, too. We admired a denim bubble-hem dress at Ameri- can Eagle with a basque waist — a far more interesting cut than the babydoll shape it would have taken in our day. And knit tops have shortened and wid- ened to something more recognizably human-shaped, thank God. The yin-yang earrings we saw at Lucky Brand? Well, those probably could have stayed in the previous mil- lennium. Same for all things low-rise, especially low enough for a thong to peek out, or putting words across our butts on sweatpants. It made us wist- fully nostalgic for a simpler time, but was not an outfit we’d choose to repeat. But capri pants? Bubble hems? Prai- rie skirts and rugby shirts? We greeted them again like old friends. Friend- ships evolve over decades, though, and sometimes they no longer fit. To be 40 going on 14 is to be haunted by the question: can we pull these outfits off? The answer, respectfully, is: Who gives an F. Approaching middle age dramatically — blessedly — reduces the amount of time one spends caring about what other people think. We only wish we hadn’t wasted so much time on it before. Because here’s what happens when you look at yourself in a mirror at 40, wearing the clothes you wore at 14: you see two selves staring back at you. Of course, you see the silver-haired ver- sion who has gone up a few sizes, who worries less about what the popular girls and the cute boys will think. But you also see that 14-year-old-girl, and love that girl, and want to reassure her: It all turns out mostly OK. Go ahead, buy the miniskirt. — The Washington Post MAURA JUDKIS AND ASHLEY FETTERS MALOY ALLIE CAREN / THE WASHINGTON POST Baggy is back, as this Levi’s store window asserts, but only on the bottom. On top, we’ve returned to skintight baby tees and camisoles. People of all sizes look for more teenie-weenie in bikinis DID bikini bottoms get smaller this summer? The short answer? Yes. (Get it? “Short”?) You may have noticed it on swim- wear-heavy TV such as Bachelor in Paradise and Love Island, where the cheekies got cheekier and the number of thongs crept up. (Get it? “Crept up”?) Searches for Love Island bikini on Google spiked in July. And on beaches and at pools, smaller bottoms have spilled out into the general population. (Get it? “Spilled out?” I’ll stop.) Thongs are, perhaps unsurprisingly, not for everyone, but some swimwear designers report that there are custom- ers who will wear nothing else. When Hayley Segar launched One- with swimwear in 2021, she offered classic medium-coverage bikini bottoms. After her designs began to circulate on social media, she heard from customers who wanted more teenie-weenie in their bikini. “The only comment we got was, ‘Thongs, thongs, thongs, thongs, where are your thongs?’” Segar said. By 2023, Segar realized that she had to act fast to meet demand. She hastily modified an existing full-coverage bottom and rushed it to the factory. “I literally told my technical design- er ‘Just chop off the cheeks,’” she said. That design, called the Huntington, has remained one of her best sellers. “Full coverage is dying,” said Elizabeth Claire Taylor, CEO of the plus size swimwear company Curvy Beach. When she founded the company in 2017, she never planned on offering thongs. Her customers gravitated toward high-waisted bottoms with full posterior coverage. But two years ago, she introduced a cheeky cut. It was a hit. In February, the company debuted its first thong. It sold out. Taylor has many customers who will never even consider wearing a thong. “When you go from booty-covered to thong, you encounter things like butt acne. You are entering into a vulnera- ble territory, and I think you’re either open to it or you’re not,” Taylor said. She’s encouraged by the increased demand for a variety of sizes. “To me, in the current political climate of this country, it is a way of practising body autonomy,” she said. Isabelle McKay, the founder of the swimwear brand Isabelle Meira, doesn’t sell thongs but has noticed a significant uptick in demand for more-revealing higher-waisted cheeky bottoms. “Five years ago we’d sell probably 70 per cent full-coverage. Now I’d say we probably sell 70 per cent cheeky,” she said. McKay sees a connection between wider demand for clothes inspired by the ’80s and ’90s, when higher waists and narrower cuts were in vogue. That could also explain that while bikini bot- toms have shrunk, more modest tankini tops are also having a major moment. It may seem counterintuitive, but some women have found that less cov- erage can be more flattering. “Higher on the hip, it just makes more of a curve, it makes the legs look a lot longer and slimmer. It’s about creating optical illusions rather than covering more,” said McKay. “Some- times covering more can almost look less flattering because it’s actually just a bigger expanse of fabric.” Javiera Del Pozo, a model from Los Angeles, has been creating “haul” videos in which she tries on swimsuits since 2016. For years, she’s been wear- ing her bikini bottoms backward as a workaround. “The front part will be smaller than the back, so I’ll get more coverage in the front and less coverage in the back,” Del Pozo said. But this summer, she’s been able to find more suits that fit the way she likes. “One, I want a good tan. I also want to feel comfortable. If anything, cover- ing up makes me feel less confident,” she said. Heather Short, who earns money posting about plus-size fashion on her thicknstrong33 TikTok channel, agreed. “For me, I’m just more comfortable when things are cheeky and small- er because I just feel it shows more curves in my body. You always look bigger when you wear bigger clothing, in my opinion,” she said. Sarah Chiwaya, a contributing editor at Refinery29 and a plus-size fashion expert, rejects “looking smaller” as a goal. But she’s happy to see that more revealing bottoms are increasingly available for more consumers. “I’m really excited to hear that there’s actually been a trend of things getting skimpier because it’s a pushback against conservative culture that’s been seeping into fashion. There’s been a push to dress in a way that is traditionally flattering, which is very much a patriarchal concept about covering up what’s improper and impure,” she said. Indeed, online summer discourse has been roaring with arguments about “trad” femininity and the politi- cal implications of cleavage, long hair, “good jeans” and heavy makeup. In one sense, women deciding to re- veal more of their bodies runs counter to conservative notions of modesty. On the other hand, if your concept of “trad” femininity includes the tradi- tion of courting men’s attention, then showing more skin could certainly fit that definition. Depending on where you’re sunbath- ing, skimpy swimsuits are nothing new. There are beaches in Brazil or Miami where thongs have been com- mon for decades. Of course, not everyone is happy with a less-is-more approach to swim bottoms. Destiny Mellow, a health-care professional from Bay Springs, Miss., posted a now-deleted video with the title “Confirmed: the cheeky bikini life just isn’t for me.” The video stemmed from her frustrations while trying to find a new swimsuit for a beach vacation. “If I were to try and swim and actually enjoy my vacation in one of those bottoms I would quite literally be flashing everyone at the pool or on the beach,” Mellow wrote in an email. But the less-skimpy items she found in stores felt dowdy and outdated, so she’s sticking with the suits she already had in her closet. “The whole section that offered what I’d call decent coverage was giving, ‘Water aerobics at 5, bingo at 6.’” — The Washington Post SHANE O’NEILL CURVY BEACH ONEWITH The plus-size brand Curvy Beach (top) has had luck with offering smaller cuts to cus- tomers of all sizes, while Onewith customers wanted cheekier swimwear. ARTS ● LIFE I FASHION ;