When Vetements held its runway debut for spring/summer 2015, Vogue’s Maya Singer described it as “the kind of thing a woman could grab rumpled off the floor and put on in the dark”. Extended shirt cuffs trailed beyond fingertips, baggy track pants pooled on the floor and tailored outerwear hung off models’ shoulders like little girls dressing up in their dad’s suit jacket. Self-consciously slap-dash yet curiously coherent, these “laughably huge proportions”, as Singer puts it, were nothing quite like the oversized clothing we’d seen before on runways – they were so, well, ordinary.
It was seven months earlier, in February 2014, that the New York Times published a story about a new fashion phenomenon called “nomcore”, an anti-aesthetic movement that fetishised the anonymity of the everyday. “Normcore isn’t about rebelling against or giving into the status quo; it’s about letting go of the need to look distinctive, to make time for something new,” wrote Fiona Duncan. This everyman (well, every man who could afford a £500 Vetements T-shirt) mood went on to define the following decade, converging and mutating into all manner of trends – from gorpcore and quiet luxury – and catapulting a number of historically “uncool” brands into the high-fashion spotlight – Birkenstocks, The North Face and New Balance, to name a few. But, through it all, the baggy silhouette remained a constant, and became one of the defining characteristics of the Gen-Z aesthetic, a demographic who scoffed at Millennials’ skinny jeans and side-partings, and embraced the XXL jeans and conspicuously capacious hoodies of their celebrity pin-up, Billie Eilish.
But that was then and this is now, and it seems as though we are on the brink of a baggy backlash. Maybe it’s because we’ve become disillusioned by the ubiquity of the stealth wealth movement, which glorified the “tiny woman in a giant coat” aesthetic (plus, there’s nothing “quiet” about your £4,000 The Row Margaux bag). Or maybe we are no longer in the thrall of the tech bro’s nomcore slouchy-jeans-and-a-baggy-T-shirt uniform, which, 10 years ago, may have came across as endearing in an overgrown adolescent sort of way, but now that the very same tech bros are dabbling in politics and preaching the gospel of the manosphere, it’s a little less charmante.
So if the nondescript, slouchy looks of the 2010s were a response to the visual excess of the internet age, then perhaps our roaring ’20s reaction to the current news cycle should be a nihilistic return to the svelte glamour of the Tom Ford for Gucci era. Indeed, the revolution is already underway.
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