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For this generation, an outfit is an assemblage of niche references, not a cohesive statement on identity
Dressing crazy has always been the provenance of youth. So why are some people so baffled by Gen Z style ? In a viral op-ed in The New York Times last month, Thomas Morton, a former Vice editor, argued that Gen Z style is “incomprehensible” compared with the legible fashions of previous generations.
He eulogized a predigital culture, where subcultural authenticity granted one currency and community. If real goths once committed to a recognizable style of all-black clothes and macabre makeup, he said, the internet has flattened that subculture into a fleeting, patchwork aesthetic such as “urban-witch-prairie-goth. ” There’s a compelling question there about how the internet mediates the relationship between clothes and identity: Who are you if your style is slippery?
But style and selfhood are fluid concepts, especially for the first generation raised online by Discord, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube – and by influencers and each other. When Euphoria premiered on HBO in 2019, the show divided critics and audiences alike. Was this a grounded, neon-drenched portrait of Gen Z, or a hollow pastiche of grittier predecessors such as Skins , Thirteen and Kids ? Most viewers, though, agreed that the clothes were killer, and that the style was the substance.
Heidi Bivens, the show’s clairvoyant costume designer, channelled generational nihilism through its costumes, nailing Gen Z’s patchworked, hyper-referential style. She assembled the characters’ looks the way an expert bartender mixes a 12-ingredient cocktail: equal pours vintage and designer, blended with nineties and 2000s references and garnished with a nod to skater and punk styles. Online and on Toronto’s Ossington strip, almost everyone under the age of 27 looked like a cast member.
There’s also a difference between dressing badly and dressing differently. As writer Natasha Stagg noted in her Substack, Selling Out , a lot of young people dress the same, and in the opposite way Morton is referring to. For every group of Euphoria extras, there’s a crew of Alo-clad clones. The difference is that they’re following different influencers.
The internet has seized our attention and distorted – even corrupted – public life. Young people are disconnected from the real-life subcultures and communities that were available to previous generations. Living on the internet is an atomizing experience. If digital culture is mainstream culture, then style is a kind of subculture.
Young people are collaging fashion references from disparate sources in a way that reflects that fragmentation. For this subculture, then, an outfit is an assemblage of niche references, not a cohesive statement on identity. With internet-driven style, change is the only constant, and extreme individuality is a kind of uniform. Gen Z style looks illegible because life does these days.
Income inequality, technofascism and geopolitical instability have obliterated consensus reality along with trust in our institutions. Dress for the job you want? Well, nearly 60 per cent of Gen Zers want to be influencers , so maybe they are. But Stagg is encouraged by Gen Z’s exuberant style.
This kind of collage dressing, she argues, suggests they feel freer to buck the rigid dress codes and more of generations past, to express and discover themselves through style at the lightning speed of a TikTok scroll. Stagg even likens this approach to Dada, the movement in which artists and writers subverted reason and traditional aesthetics as a rebuke to the horrors of the First World War. Style is still subjective.
Nobody cares whether I, a millennial who hated Euphoria , think Gen Z dresses well. But a generational tendency toward indecipherable style signals something about the collective cultural mood. Mashing up fashions from eras past and present might even be a tacit rejection of MAGA style – the bodycon dresses, soaring heels, power suits and conservative loafers that have become the costume of authoritarianism.
Just as the Dadaists made art in a world that no longer made sense, doomscrolling youth are dressing for doomsday. If the world’s ending, you might as well get a fit off.
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