It’s All Good but is Everything Cool?
Yeah, everything is cool. Maybe it’s Instagram offering a “how-to” for every fashion lane or the sheer competition in the marketplace due to an increase in opportunity, but in general, everything is cool. Early 2000s? Dunks? Jeans with flare (an impossible thought 5 years ago)? Check. Throw in trucker caps too – ROYGBIV truckers sell out instantly every drop, including a special collaboration with The Webster just last week.
What about vintage? Yes, cool. We’ve touched on the surge of independent vintage sellers previously. Pick up some 90s orange tab Levis. If you’ve been around long enough, you remember looking for red tabs as evidence of vintage cool when you were tired of orange tabs. What an opportunity to reflect on the passage of time…perhaps wasted worrying about such things. Make sure your vintage tee is single stitch. Even dumb vintage kitschy tees are back in force these days. We’re in at least the 3rd wave of the vintage rock tee market that started in the early 2000s, picked up again with Jerry Lorenzo’s thrifting, and currently sees $500 price tags for some fairly mediocre 90s bands.
Do you need more 90s? Tommy collaborated with Patta. You could wear the Kith collaboration too. Heron Preston just dropped a Calvin Klein campaign, only to miss to the opportunity to include Marky Mark. Really, we’ve been saying the 90s are on trend for the last decade or so – the era of the best Helmut Lang and Nike collections, Jodeci’s much under-appreciated influence, and Seinfeld normcore that was revitalized in the mid-2010s and really hasn’t gone away.
Cozy is still good. Elevated sweats are still everywhere. The bomber era that kicked off with Kanye’s Raf and Haider Ackermann choices never really faded. We all seemed to accept that we want bombers in our lives forever. Japanese labels like Visvim and Kapital are seeing most of my attention these days and thankfully never going anywhere. Workwear was huge around a decade ago and you can still head straight from building a home to the club and potentially skip the line.
Ah, here’s one, the Ed Hardy aesthetic. Sure, we aren’t quite there, but its cooler, subtler and intimidating cousin Chrome Hearts is everywhere. If you want to count out Ed, please note that Von Dutch truckers are being sold right next to those aforementioned insta-sellout ROYGBIV truckers at The Webster.
By ZK