My little cousin showed up to a family dinner last Thanksgiving wearing a JNCO-adjacent pair of baggy jeans, a cropped baby tee, and platform sneakers that Scary Spice would have absolutely approved of. She was born in 2004. The last Blockbuster closed when she was six years old. And yet somehow she looked like she had just stepped off the set of a TLC music video, which is a sentence I never thought I would write but here we are.
This is not a coincidence. This is a movement.
Gen Z has gone fully, completely, unapologetically back to the 90s when it comes to how they dress, and the more you look at why, the more sense it actually makes.
Here is the thing about 90s fashion that gets lost when people talk about it as a trend. It was not aspirational in the polished, curated way that fashion became in the 2010s. It was expressive. There is a difference.
When Cher Horowitz walked into school in her yellow plaid skirt set in Clueless, she was not optimizing for engagement. She was just being Cher. When Will Smith showed up to the Banks mansion in Fresh Prince wearing a geometric print shirt over a long sleeve tee with a sideways hat, nobody on that set was thinking about how it would photograph for Instagram because Instagram did not exist. They were just dressing like a person who had opinions about clothes.
That specificity, that sense of fashion as genuine self-expression rather than performance, is exactly what Gen Z is chasing right now. They grew up watching everyone around them dress for algorithms and they are exhausted by it. The 90s represents a pre-optimization world and they want in.
I know it sounds like I am about to be very nostalgic and annoying about Blockbuster. Bear with me because this is relevant.
The video store was a sensory experience in a way that nothing digital has ever replicated. You walked in and the walls were covered floor to ceiling with VHS boxes, each one competing for your attention with the most visually aggressive cover art imaginable. Neon colors. Bold typography. Dramatic imagery with zero restraint. The horror section alone was a masterclass in maximalist design. Nothing was filtered. Nothing was algorithm-sorted to match your previous rentals. You just walked the aisles and absorbed everything.
That visual loudness was the water that 90s fashion swam in. It was the backdrop against which those clothes were being worn, and it shaped what felt normal. Wearing three clashing patterns was not a statement, it was just Tuesday. Platform shoes were not ironic, they were just shoes. A bucket hat was just a hat.
Gen Z discovered this world through YouTube compilations and their parents’ photo albums and something in them recognized it as more alive than what they had grown up with. So they started dressing accordingly.
If you want to see the 90s video store aesthetic playing out in real time, just pay attention to what is actually selling and being worn right now.
Slip dresses worn over long sleeve shirts. This one goes straight back to 1997 and the general teenage girl aesthetic of the late 90s, which itself was influenced by movies like 10 Things I Hate About You and music videos from artists like Fiona Apple and Liz Phair. The slip dress became shorthand for a certain kind of cool girl effortlessness and Gen Z read that message loud and clear.
Baggy straight-leg jeans worn low. The specific silhouette is mid-90s hip-hop influenced streetwear, the kind of thing you saw in every Nas and Biggie video, the kind of thing that TLC wore so well that they basically owned it for a decade. Skinny jeans did not disappear because of a fashion decree. They disappeared because a generation that grew up wearing them decided they were done with them and reached for something that felt like more of a choice.
Windbreakers and track jackets from brands like FILA and Kappa. Butterfly clips, which sold out everywhere within weeks of Euphoria’s first season airing because Heidi Bivens put them on the cast and an entire generation of viewers had a simultaneous realization. Chunky sneakers. Tube tops. Crop everything.
None of these pieces are ironic. That is the part that older fashion observers keep getting wrong. Gen Z is not wearing these things as a joke about the past. They genuinely love them.
It would be dishonest to talk about the 90s fashion revival without acknowledging that Euphoria basically handed an instruction manual to an entire generation.
The costume design on that show is extraordinary. Heidi Bivens pulled from 90s maximalism, early 2000s teenage girl aesthetics, and a certain kind of glittery, unrestrained self-expression that most of mainstream fashion had scrubbed out of itself by the mid-2010s. Glitter on the face. Rhinestone everything. Tops that were technically underwear. It was loud and specific and the response from young viewers was not nostalgia, it was recognition. Like they were seeing something that already existed somewhere inside their aesthetic sensibility and now had a name and a reference point.
Yellowjackets did something similar with the specific grunge-adjacent early 90s look of flannel and combat boots and the particular way teenage girls wore oversized clothes in 1996. The show premiered and those pieces immediately started circulating harder on Depop.
Hollywood keeps feeding this thing and Gen Z keeps eating it.
One of the most interesting parts of this whole moment is where the clothes are actually coming from. Previous nostalgia cycles mostly played out through fast fashion retailers producing cheap versions of vintage looks. Gen Z said no thank you and went to find the originals.
Depop, Poshmark, ThredUp, and good old Goodwill have become genuine first-choice shopping destinations for younger consumers rather than backup options. Finding an actual 90s FUBU jacket or a real Tommy Hilfiger color block piece from 1995 carries a completely different energy than buying a reproduction and everyone involved seems to understand that.
This also means the trend looks wildly different from person to person, which is the whole point. Two people who are both deep into 90s fashion will show up wearing completely different things because their specific finds are theirs. That individuality is not a side effect of thrift shopping. For a lot of these kids it is the entire reason.
I have seen a few think pieces suggesting that 90s fashion is peaking and will fade like every other trend cycle. I think that misreads what is actually happening.
The 90s aesthetic is not popular because it is trendy. It is popular because it solves a real problem that Gen Z has with how fashion works right now. It gives them a reference point for dressing expressively without the weight of curated personal branding. It connects them to an era that felt less mediated, less optimized, less exhausting. Until something else comes along that solves those problems, the 90s are staying.
The butterfly clips are not going anywhere. The platform sneakers are not going anywhere. The baggy jeans are not going anywhere.
And honestly, as someone who remembers the original run of all of this? I am not even a little bit mad about it.
Allen Tellis is a writer with a background in entertainment, pop culture, and collector culture. He covers the intersection of physical media, nostalgia, and how the films and music of past decades continue to shape the world we live in today. You can find him at WatchRoster.com, a platform for physical media collectors to track their collections and discover what their movies are actually worth.
The Fashion and Style enthusiast with a flair for drama and entertainment! A millennial on the lookout for the trending styles inspired by and believes in: “You can get anything in life if you have the right dress for it!” Adding a little magic through the power of words and not holding back on fashion and styling opinions! Let’s connect to stay on top of trend alerts and the who is who of Fashion world and get inspired to give your personality the styling oomph you’ve been craving for! Nageen Abbas at Vogue Vocal is the brains behind our Woke Vogue and Lifestyle Library!
