Zoomer Style is Complete Mishigas

When the current fashion cycle is as hopeless and depressing as the news cycle

“Why do Zoomers dress like that?” I asked my friend Joanne the other day. We were sitting in a Starbucks eyeing two twentysomething women waiting for their drinks – one wearing a crudely cut-off denim skirt over a pair of ratty vintage Adidas warm-ups, five-sizes-too-big military surplus bomber jacket and platform creepers, the other wearing a double-breasted 80s-era office-formal blazer, bike shorts, four-inch rubber-soled sandals with giant buckles and blinding white mid-calf gym socks. They were soon joined by a friend wearing a crochet knit bra top, acid wash mom jeans, dirty white sneakers, gold-mirrored gas station sunglasses and at least three zit patches.

“It’s like they fell in a Good Will bin and played dress-up in the dark,” she replied.

No use in sugar-coating it: GenZ style is a sh*t sandwich. The basic recipe is to layer ill-fitting Y2K sweatshop deadstock over a vintage 1970s Butterick pattern creation and accessorize with kitsch 80s home-made jewelry, piercings in unusual places (tongue, eyebrow, the column between their two nostrils) and something kawaii–the emetic ‘Hello Kitty’ cutesiness Japanese girls never grow out of. 

The general vibe is chaotic, hopeless and insolvent–which, to their credit, pretty much describes the state of the world. 

Might as well get it over with and cue the naysayers. Go on, say it…

• ***hairy eyeball*** Old man shakes cane, yells ‘get off my lawn’...

• Every generation dismisses the next one in line as feckless, decadent and lost…

• ‘Offbeat’ is how young people are supposed to dress. It’s a function of higher risk-taking, something that diminishes with age…

That final point was from Joanne, who reminded me that in high school, we probably considered this cool…

Point taken. But even at our worst moments, we GenXers dressed like we had aspirations or basic competence, maybe even a little grit in the face of some major crisis. Can you imagine any of these three storming the beaches of Normandy?

Who knows? Maybe it’s all a ploy to wriggle out of the draft. Except for the guy on the right who looks like the aliens made contact and asked him to meet on that particular corner. 

The above images were captured from a viral TikTok video of New York fashion students back for their first day of class. I showed it to a precocious Zoomer friend who shrugged and said “yeah? So their outfits look weird to you. That’s because you’re old, they’re young and in a process of self-discovery. They’re bound to dress eccentrically.”

Me: By ‘eccentric’ you mean…

Precocious Zoomer: Outside the norm. Not conventional…

Me: Define conventional…

Precocious Zoomer: Professional, normal… 

Me: But every last person in this video is dressed unconventionally. Which makes it the convention…

Precocious Zoomer: ***furls brow, scratches head***

Curiously, there is one student in the video who happens to dress unconventionally, which is to say conventionally. Wandering around campus, he may have been mistaken for a finance intern from Nebraska, yet he’s the I’d vote most likely to have his own fashion house one day…

Did you catch the second season of The White Lotus? If so, you may have noticed the absurd wardrobe of Portia, the personal assistant to Tanya, the eccentric and emotionally scarred heiress portrayed by Jennifer Coolidge. If you were paying close attention, you would have noticed two things: a) Portia's wardrobe epitomized the TikTok Zoomer aesthetic, and b) amidst a cast of unsavory characters, including a group of debauched murderous gays, a duo of glamorous grifting hookers, and a Stanford grad dimwitted enough to fall for one of the grifting hookers, Portia emerged as the internet-declared true villain. Critics characterized her as insufferably passive and self-absorbed.

I can't help but think the vitriol she faced was largely influenced by her wardrobe, curated from the hottest designs and designers in the fashion universe…

Still, Portia’s cosmic psychedelic binder bandeau and matching high-waisted leggings have nothing on Tinasha’s outfit…

Like you, I have no idea who Tinasha is, nor do I know where to even begin with this outfit. If I had to guess, between those dishwasher gloves and shoe mops, she’s on the cleaning staff at Vogue.

‘Cleaner’ might be one of the few remaining opportunities left for this generation, hence—at the risk of reading too much into it—the unseriousness of their style choices. Already, they’ve lived through a disastrously mismanaged health crisis, leading to trillions in printed money, the worst inflation in 40 years, AI obliterating entire industries and home ownership–once the most reliable path to wealth– officially out of reach. Hell, home rentership is out of reach. No wonder their outfits radiate uneasiness. Or maybe it all just makes me feel uneasy.

Perhaps this is what future fashion historians zero in on when picking through the rubble of the 2020s. Wandering around in their silver spacesuits, they’ll uncover that back-to-school video or Anna Wintour’s idea of a cleaner’s uniform et voila, they’ll have their Rosetta Stone–the key to unlocking the moment Western civilization began to slide in earnest.