Here’s what I refuse to wear from the Y2K resurgence: low- rise jeans. I know they’re back, because my assistant Taylor keeps sending me pictures of celebrities and Model Hallwalkers™ wearing them, trying to will them into trendy territory with the strength of her because-I-can edit. But I will never get over how low-rise jeans demanded you do everything standing up and made the lives of anyone with a belly button immeasurably worse.
You had to watch how you sat. You couldn’t bend over to pick something up. Hell, bending over to put your clothes on in the morning was awkward because you were so hyper-aware of your jeans creeping up, Your “muffin top” was your enemy.
It lived on your body, mocking you at every angle but straight-on. Low-rise jeans made thongs a necessity and booty tattoos a full-on personality.
“I’ll never understand how those came back,” I told Taylor last summer, as we were talking about trends that come in and out of style every few years.
“Some things are just bad ideas. We all learned that low-rise jeans weren’t any good and moved on.” Low-rise jeans are like collared necklaces for your pants. You tried them once when you were little and your mom made you wear a shirt tucked into them so they vaguely resembled actual pants and immediately regretted it.
This week she sent me pictures of not one but three designers showcasing form-fitting jeans that stopped well above their model’s belly buttons, followed by Instagram street styles of babies walking around with their underwear draped over their jeans like belts and belly chains jangling around above their waistbands. The Y2K resurgence I knew was coming had finally reached peak terror. “Why are they back?!” I texted her, horrified.
“We thought we left those in 2004!” “I like them tho 😊,” she responded, remembering nothing but her own toddler years when low-rise jeans were considered trendy. Welcome to 2025. In which every single dreaded trend from the early 2000s is coming back courtesy of a generation that only knows them from The Simple Life reruns and their sister’s ancient Facebook pictures.
All of the things we thought we’d leave behind in 2020 are crawling out of fashion’s many stitched-up corpses and shimmying their way back into stores. To us boomers of the Y2K generation, these outfits represented traumatic reminders of a low-rise hell we thought we’d never see again. To Generation Z, they’ll be adorable insta-backdrops and throwback threads.
I am having a meltdown. If you, too, lived through the height of Y2K outfits and feel personally violated by theses scenes of sartorial homicide creeping through your feed, read on. I will take you through all of the worst trends from the early 2000s, explain how fucked up they were to live through the first time around, and offer slightly less tragic ways to achieve the same look without sacrificing all dignity and maturity.
Behold: the dreaded visible thong. Also known as a “whale tail”, despite the fact that whale tails have grooves and these bad boys proudly jutted straight out. Men proudly sported “baggin’ bags”—mesh underwear with the straps pulled up high enough to be seen above your pants—as casually as we sport our boxer shorts today.
Low-rise jeans were a necessary companion to these traumatic underwear pieces, as they needed to be high enough up your thighs to somehow keep your underwear up. But why thongs specifically? Were bikinis and briefs too comfortable for us back then?
Someone save me now, because I don’t know that I can handle remembering how low-rise jeans and their requisite underwear companion became such a big thing. Celebrities flocked to red carpets in bejeweled thong straps dangling above their waistbands. Teenagers everywhere learned how to hike their underwear up high enough to stay put, but low enough to provide maximum visibility.
It was awful and wonderful and everyone did it. The nice thing about the 2025 version? It’s simply a stylistic choice, not a functional one.
Designer Dion Lee debuted pants that feature fake thong straps for nobody’s actual underwear to live in, and other brands have designed dresses and skirts with visible straps incorporated into the garments themselves. Again with the pants, you can also rock cute jeans with fun seaming or strappy details at the waist. Please just don’t actually wear your underwear as a fashion statement.
No one needs to see that level of detail. If you still want to do something in that vein, wait for summer and rock your bikini top as a top over your favorite jeans. It’s far less irritating that way.
Ah, platform flip flops. The achilles’ heel of your 2003 summer wardrobe. Comfortable?
No. Allowed anywhere that wasn’t the beach? Also no.
You somehow wore them everywhere, because platforms were cool and sandals were summer. Even though wearing them was basically asking strangers to watch you trip every time you walked somewhere. I had at least four pairs in various colors.
Thanks, Columbia House for CDs. Platforms are back, baby! Except instead of the fluffy nightmare that provided no ankle support and made “slap” the replacement word for “said” in all of our sentences, we have actual shoes made by luxury designers.
Bless Versace for blessing us with these again, but please note that they are still just as impossible to walk in as they were in 2003. I will never not think of being chased by a cheetah every time I see someone wearing them. If you must embrace this horror, please for the love of all that is holy get the ones with ankle straps.
You’ll thank me when you’re not constantly reinjuring your ankle. Please also note that there are dozens of gorgeous platform sandals out now that don’t require you to perch your toes on the very tip of the shoe at all times or they’ll fly off. Choose wisely.
The thing I never thought I’d see return to our collective wardrobes? Going out tops. Top at-a-glance: any shirt that could not, under any circumstances, be worn during daylight hours but was worn all the time for going out.
They were typically constructed out of satin or some other shiny material, frequently featured rhinestones, plunging necklines, and nearly always had some type of tie and/or straps that did not serve any logical purpose. Why were going-out tops a thing? To take pictures of yourself lookingsexy00 in club bathrooms before Instagram was even a concept.
That’s why. The updated version of this nightmare is all over social media. Bella Hadid was spotted wearing one on the street (actual street, not just SoCal sunset boulevard), but this trend is slightly less “Hello Kitty Lives!” chains and more interesting cut-outs and cropped silhouettes.
That being said, I can only handle going-out tops in moderation. The trick is to choose one focal point rather than overwhelming yourself (and your boobs) with every shiny detail known to womankind. A fun cutout, an asymmetric neckline, or a lovely fabric will help you channel that going-out top energy without looking like you raided your middle school dance dress collection.
News flash: Denim is making a comeback. Say it with me now: Low-rise jeans. But they don’t stop there!
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Acid-wash denim! Denim skirts over jeans! Denim shirts with denim jackets!
Skinny jeans! Bootcut jeans! I get it, Taylor.
Denim is versatile, and it never really went anywhere. But come ON. Some things are sacred.
Low-rise jeans traumatized a generation of millennials by making us think we had to wear underwear as outerwear. They restricted our movement. They were advertised with petite models, which did not translate well for anyone over a size 0 when trying on jeans.
Thankfully, there are ways to bring back some of your favorite denim trends without sacrificing all dignity. High-waisted skinny jeans are back in style for a reason — they actually fit most people’s body shapes and allow you to move freely again. Thank goodness.
TL;DR? If your denim doesn’t actually touch your body in any way, you can wear it. “I felt really cool wearing denim on denim!” my niece excitedly told me the other day as we browsed a local clothing store. “Why can’t people wear that now?” “Oh sweetheart, let me tell you about why people couldn’t wear denim on denim,” I replied, opening a well-crafted tangent into why shopping for jeans is like being an undercover onion crying in secrecy. She’ll learn.
Hopefully when this trend comes back around again, I can warn her first. For everyone who, like me, spent the early 2000s begrudgingly rocking a belly button ring thanks to the excess skin the crop tops and tube tops of the time required you to display at all times: consider yourselves warned. The mini comeback kids ain’t knowin’ nothin’… about belly button rings.
My parents hated it when I got my belly button pierced so I waited until my birthday and snuck down to Pierced & Piercing with my friend Emily and my kitten beanies pierced without them knowing. It was a bit painful but worth it to show off my new ring. For the next few years I caught it on things constantly until I finally gave up and had it removed during my late-teens annoyance with myself over the decision.
Now celebrities are sporting belly button rings like it’s nobody’s business, including Bella Hadid, who rocked a teensy weensy ring on Only Fans recently. In addition to belly button rings, there are also belly chains — essentially chains that hang off your belly button like some type of midriff bling. And while the options are a bit more sophisticated than the punk rock-looking rings we were rocking in 2003, the concept is the same: screwing holes into your body and adorning them with jewelry for other people to see.
Mine hurt for weeks after I got it done, and I spent majority of high school angling my tops to ensure it wasn’t grabbed by something that would rip it out. Ugh, adolescence. If you’re fully grown and thinking about getting your belly re-pierced, consider my wrath.
And if you’re nervous about committing to a hole in your stomach, a faux belly chain might be the way to go. You can find them all over Etsy, and they look just like the real thing but without the pain or fear of infection. I will never understand how anyone my age didn’t live through the Y2K resurgence and chose instead to watch it happen through the eyes of people who were there.
They’ll see these trends and grab onto whatever floats their boat, with zero of the context us boomers have about how low-rise jeans were basically invented to torture us. Hell, they might not even realize how low-rise these jeans are until they try to sit down! “I just don’t get what’s wrong with low-rise jeans,” my niece said to me last weekend as we wandered around the mall.
“They’re comfy, and they’re just jeans. Wear something else if you don’t like ’em!” And maybe that’s my problem with this entire generation wearing Y2K trends. We didn’t get a choice the first time these horrors came around.
Low-rise jeans were required wearing if you wore pants at all in 2003. There were literally no alternatives available to us that weren’t leggings or jeans from JCPenney with playful floral prints. We ate our jean-torture sandwiches and dealt with the shame of having a muffin top.
Thankfully, because fashion has become such a sprawling entity these days, there are thousands of different styles and brands and cuts and fabrics that everyone can explore. You can wear low-rise jeans if you want to, but you can also wear high-waisted bootcuts or flare jeans or cropped pants. Options, people!
With that in mind, let me just take this opportunity to point out that certain things will NEVER be acceptable to come back in style and mock our generation with their sins of the past. Please don’t subject us to the following: Micro-brow makeup. You knew your brows weren’t right when you spent most of middle school trying to grow them back.
Bubble Dresses. Truly God’s punishment for storing chips in your car. Belts as necklaces.
No one. Chunky light-blonde highlights. Please.
HOWEVER. If you do find yourself wanting to dip your toe back into the Y2K vibe pool, just remember to take it easy and keep the rest of your outfit modern. Pair your low-rise jeans with an oversized blazer instead of a crop top.
Wear your going out-top with some modern-day skinny jeans instead of bootcuts. And please for the love of fashion, pay attention to fabric and fit. A lot of the trends we loved in the early 2000s were cheaply made and barely lasted one sweaty night of clubbing without falling apart.
The current iterations of these trends are much higher quality with more flattering cuts than we were rocking back then. Of course, please also just avoid anything that genuinely gave you body dysmorphia 20 years ago. Just because you can relive that trauma doesn’t mean you should.
I will never stop wearing high waisted jeans again. I’ve accepted that other Y2K trends will be back and I will just have to deal. Platform sandals?
I can get behind those, as long as they have ankle straps (I’m not a monster).
Fun hats and brightly colored headbands? Will rock those until the day I die.
Cute going-out tops? Only if they don’t have rhinestones weighing them down. But please.
Let me keep waistbands that actually fit my body. While I was perusing a vintage shop in Williamsburg last weekend, I made a pit-stop at the early 2000s rack. Running my fingers along the textured denim of low-rise jeans I once wore proudly in middle school, I overhead two teenage girls commenting on the styles. “Oh my god these are so vintage,” one exclaimed, holding up a shirt covered in oversized, rainbowsequined spirals that I’m 99% sure was in my closet freshman year of high school. “Like, back then everyone wasn’t afraid to have fun with fashion!” Had I not been shopping with my brother (Hi Mike, love you! ), I would have turned around and unleashed a tirade upon these children about how crippling and awful low-rise jeans were, how hard we had to avoid sitting down in public because our entire lives were on display, and how I caught my belly button ring on a loofah once and will never live it down.
Instead I smiled and walked away, letting them have their little millennial bubble while I go buy some mom jeans. They’ll learn. God knows when low-rise jeans come back around next.
