Y2K: What you need to know?

Y2K – Year 2000 problem: With each passing day, the return to the lifestyle and fashion of the 2000s continues! We discussed the rising Y2K trend and trend style codes.

You have noticed; A wind of 2000s nostalgia is blowing around the world. The catalyst for this may be that for those born late in the X-generation, a true legend, a tumultuous love story that would crush any romantic movie script, unexpectedly sprouts into the middle of our lives nearly two decades later. Or vice versa; Maybe it was the spirit of the times that raised the love of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck from the ashes, who knows?

Y2K: Dress codes & More

It’s called Y2K. Year 2000. This is a global trend shaped by the yearning for the turn of the millennium. It is possible to say that the cultural elements, reunions, aesthetic values and clothing styles of the Millennium, which have been crippled by Covid-19 and rising gradually in 2020 and after, are spreading through TikTok.

In Blumarine’s Autumn 2021, Spring and Resort 2022 collections, denim fabric, butterfly form, snakeskin pattern, low-waisted trousers and mini skirts, chiffon ruffled blouses and ultra-loose trousers, which are key codes of the Y2K trend, are leading. It is clear that the denim dresses in the collection are especially inspired by the iconic 2001 American Music Awards look of the Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake couple.

The buzzing question is why do we miss the millennium turnaround?

Generally, the years 1997-2003 are considered to be the “Millennium Turn”. No one has been caught up in speed yet, let alone escaping from the city, we are burning with love for London and Berlin, being roommates in the city is a new and great fun, we watched Friends, Seinfeld, then Sex and the City and discussed the lines of these series at friends’ meetings all week long, most of all; In the late 90s and early 2000s, when we looked at life with hope and happiness, it was as if there was a transparent, unique, protective power shield covering us.

Wherever we go, iconic couples like Brad Pitt – Jennifer Aniston, Johnny Depp – Kate Moss, Victoria – David Beckham, Britney Spears – Justin Timberlake burst forth, no one can interfere in the life of the other, there is still such a thing as private life, people who should be forgotten. on the other hand, he did not appear in front of us on social media; the years when children acted like children and young people pretended to be teenagers, and when 15-year-olds skipped school and went to the football match, the movies or wherever they were having fun, not the climate crisis protest.

Of course, just as every good thing has a dark side; Inclusiveness, where the dominance of the white race is extremely effective in the world, the concept of gender equality is on the ground, uniform sexual preference is accepted by the global society, the 0-body aesthetics spread by Kate Moss and heroin-chic style is at its peak, therefore the not overly thin is excluded from the beautiful norms. It is also a difficult period in which the word has not yet been discovered. For this reason, Y2K is a trend that is criticized as much as it is applauded.

The biggest criticism of the Friends Reunion broadcast, which was planned to be held in 2020 but hung in May of this year due to the pandemic conditions, is “Why and how this series, which creates scandal with its homophobic lines, supports white race domination, reflects a powdery pink, unreal world, is a phenomenon again in today’s conditions. It was developed on the “launched as”. The nostalgia of the 2000s also gets its share of this criticism. Productions such as Mean Girls and Clueless, which are among the Millennium phenomenon films that re-entered our lives with Y2K, are also the target of these criticisms.

Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, one of the iconic couples of the period, attended the 2001 American Music Awards with their denim dresses and suits, and this look was considered a fashion disaster at that time and was widely teased. Now, especially Britney’s denim dress is a real phenomenon on the radar of fashion icons and fashion giants and designers.

Denim fabric, which permeates every function and everywhere in the millennium fashion from the red carpet to the street fashion, is once again a part of official invitations with Y2K. Bootcut jeans, which were identified with celebrities such as Britney Spears and Halle Berry in the 2000s, have already begun to take their place at official invitations. Kate Moss completed her bootcut jean with a velvet jacket at the Richard Quinn Spring 2022 collection fashion show.

What is Y2K actually?

Y2K is not really a fashion term. Oddly enough, it doesn’t make much of a positive sense for Generation X. In other words, as it is written in many places, “the style of dressing on the red carpets of the 2000s” is not at all. At least it wasn’t like that in 2000. Its first and main opening points to a major global crisis.

In the middle of 1999, warnings were made that the computer virus called Y2K, which connected 1999 to 2000, would collapse all digital systems and plunge the world into chaos as soon as it hit 12 o’clock at night. Despite this, the New Year’s Eve in 2000 was a year of great stress for everyone except the minority who were content with what they produced in the countryside.

Because at that time, the date input of the digital systems that ruled the world was 6 digits. 1900 standard was accepted, years were expressed as 88, 98, 99 in the system. In this case 00 would be accepted as 1900, not 2000 in the system. It was said that all interconnected systems that operate globally will collapse as soon as we enter 2000, causing financial markets to crash, planes to crash and hospital equipment to fail.

Fortunately, the Y2K virus was defeated on the first day of 2000, thanks to a joint global effort to quickly update computer systems. At this point, it should be added that during all this, there were also those who saw the Y2K virus as a hoax intended to create panic, and that the number of these people was not small at all. Is it familiar?

Y2K > C-19

In her article titled Y2K > C-19, trend guru Marianne Salzman examines the potential global crisis of twenty years ago and the global crisis of now in terms of sociological behavioral patterns. “I find it instructive to see the present and the future through the prism of the past, seeing obvious parallels between 2020 and Y2K. In 2020, we felt the impact of the explosion that we managed to put off twenty years ago. The predicted consequences of the Y2K virus twenty years ago came much later and in a different way than expected.

Financial markets, for example, weren’t shrouded in darkness in 2020, but they were smashed and unemployment neared the peak of the Great Depression in the US. Planes did not crash; instead, they couldn’t take off for very long as social distancing rules kept people at home. Hospitals, not equipment failures; She succumbed to the overload of not being able to gather important equipment such as enough ventilators in certain areas and hosting many critical patients at the same time,” she says. “In 2000 we thought we had survived an existential crisis, but we never realized the tsunami that would engulf us twenty years later. Let’s hope we don’t have the same debate in 2040.”

Salzman emphasizes that the obvious difference in the behavioral trends of global society twenty years after the Y2K crisis is the reason for the chaos in the first year of the war with COVID-19: “During the Y2K virus panic, our institutions were so strong and our faith in the experts was so strong; The world was able to turn a deaf ear to conspiracy theorists and work in harmony to come together in no time to fend off the worst effects. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said in an interview with CNN in January 2000 that the Y2K crisis “remains a pretty minor issue as a result of people working together quickly and decisively.” We would see the effect.”

Twenty years later, again, Bill Gates warned world governments, this time at a BBC meeting, that they were not adequately prepared for the new coronavirus. We’ve all seen the result of that. The truth is, we are in a different world in 2020 than we were in 1999. We are more divided. The more skeptical we are, the less willing we are to set aside partisan ideologies to serve the social good. Our calendars have moved forward by twenty years, but the global community seems to be moving in the opposite direction—sometimes at breakneck speed.”

GEN-Zii and nostalgia

Jennifer Lopez is one of the pioneers of the Y2K movement in the pop world. At every opportunity, she appears before the audience with details that refer to her own Millennium anniversary image. At the end of October, she kept the same attitude with her hair, make-up and whale tail effect pants at the RocknRoll Hall of Fame.

So, who are the disconnected, skeptical and partisans? Which generation? He always consumed, consumed more as he was given, then drowned in his own consumption, and now he took his face in his palms and said, “Where did we go wrong?” Isn’t it generation X who says?

George Berger, who is constantly beating himself up, holding the hand of this unhappy and helpless generation and saying “Let the sun come in*”, modified with technology, our new hope, the Z generation, who has lost a little Janis Joplin spirit; He didn’t hesitate to name the Millennium aesthetic, which he discovered in old photographs of his parents, perhaps in his wardrobe, and revived in the skies of Tik Tok, a virus, a global crisis. It is known that turning Y2K out of fear, boredom, crisis and making it a “cool” expression is not for every brave man.

However, the rapid acceptance of the trend not only among adolescents, but also among adults, and the re-entering of our lives with nostalgic images of the sense of trust lost in 2020 with mass panic, is attributed to the fact that this is a kind of personal healing process.

It is not difficult to imagine that families with children, who were exposed to concepts such as remote work, distance education, life fits at home, and closed for an indefinite period during the pandemic isolation process, showed interest in photo albums, cabinets where old clothes were kept, and even chests, and they made fashion shows themselves with the treasures found in these places.

What comes out of those chests is the good feelings of the past, which are thought to remain in the photographs, rather than the old clothes; The element that ignites the adult Y2K trend is the desire to be motivated to remember, remind, and overcome the pandemic crisis by keeping the style codes of those joyful days in which people, friends, society, the world, and the future trusted. No matter how much it is criticized, Y2K style glasses with pink lenses are necessary for all of us to heal and renew, at least until they fulfill their function.

Y2K style codes

The clothing choices of stars such as Lily-Rose Depp, Lupita Nyong’o, Jennifer Lopez and Teyana Taylor at this year’s Met Gala show that Y2K is not a temporary trend. However, the reflection of the Y2K style, which can be adapted to daily life, to the 2020s, of course, is not just about combining old clothes waiting in the wardrobe with each other.

Because we’re not at the Met Gala, and our outfits aren’t costumes. Twenty years is considered enough time for a style to make a comeback in the fashion world. In the 90s, the 70s, and in the 2010s, the 90s were back, you remember. However, many details that are interesting for those who are very young at the turn of the millennium and do not know style at all risk being “old” or even boring on adults who are eager to evaluate their old clothes. For this, it is important to use our favorite old pieces together with the current ones and adapt the style to the present.

Low rise jeans

Although jeans with a fitted waistband are essentially identical with rock icons such as Robert Plant, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and the spirit of the 70s, the person who seduced the modern low-waisted jean craze is none other than Alexander McQueen, the bad boy of fashion. not. The first appearance of the Bumster pants, as famous as McQueen himself, dates back to the highly “anti-romantic” Nihilism collection in 1994.

With a mesh of only 7.5 cm in length, the Bumsters expose the coccyx, which according to the fashion designer is “the most erotic part of anyone’s body, male or female”, McQueen’s muse and best friend, the biggest fashion icon of the era, Kate Moss. It quickly covered the red carpet events and left its mark on the Millennium fashion with the support of .Denim fabric is the most dominant detail of the Y2K trend. However, the return of low-waisted jeans is seen in both trousers and skirts as the leading wave of the trend.

Crop top, bustier, strapless blouse… Tasseled, floral, stoned chain belts and waist chain

The highly alternative, gothic look created by Lee Mcqueen took on a sexier, bright and flamboyant feel in the hands of popular pop/hip-hop singers of the era such as Pussycat Dolls, Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, J.Lo. . Ultra-low-waisted trousers and skirts at the hip, complemented by a metal, tasseled belt; Slim waist emphasis became the common trend of the period with the singlet cut above the navel, bustier, strapless blouses and waist chains.

Whale tail

Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera launched a brand new trend in the late ’90s by displaying g-string elastics from inside their Bumster pants, just as Madonna in the ’80s stopped showing the bra and bra straps under the blouse in public. Names such as Hailey Bieber, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, Kim Kardashian, Beyonce are at the forefront of reviving the trend after 20 years.

Hailey Bieber was one of the first to adopt the trend. Actress Gillian Anderson, who now gives life to the psychologist mother character in the Sex Education series, appeared at the 2019 Met Gala in a pink Alexander Wang dress inspired by the legendary dress that left the g-string triangle exposed, which she wore at the Vanity Fair After Party after the 2001 Oscar Awards Ceremony, Versace. On the other hand, in the Spring 2020 collection, skirts and trousers with the belt part cut off and given a whale tail effect were included.

Everything with butterfly forms and patterns

The most famous practitioner of the butterfly trend at the turn of the millennium is Mariah Carey, and its current phenomena are Dua Lipa, Bella Hadid and Olivia Rodrigo. Dua Lipa wore a Versace dress with a butterfly embroidered front to the Grammy Awards this year. On her Instagram profile, she appears in butterfly-themed outfits. Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid are among the fans of the 2022 Blumarine collection. Ungaro, the brand of Mariah Carey’s iconic butterfly bustier from 2000, included plenty of butterfly motifs in its Spring 2022 collection.

Low waist a-line/pleated mini skirt, midi skirt and suit cardigan or jacket

The costumes of Millennial teen comedy stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Alicia Silverstone in iconic movies such as Mean Girls and Clueless are also an important part of the Y2K trend adopted by teenagers. These endless pinks and mingling yellows of “Candy Girl Self” look fortunately matured in the Miu Miu Spring 2022 collection, again adapted to the present day by taking the ultra-flat pants of the 2000s and the iconic slip dresses of the Rachel Green character from the Friends series.