Derelicte

In my experience, popular youth fashion has had one objective in common throughout the years: to make the wearer look as bad as possible. Here's a brief throw back to some of the awful fashion trends of yester-year:

Hammer Pants (circa 5th or 6th grade): Ok, so you want us to look more pear-shaped?

Afro-centric garb a la TLC and Arrested Development (circa middle school): The brighter, the better, and oh so baggy. We were the whitest black and proud around.

Grunge (I personally stuck with this one for most of high-school): Lots of flannel, corduroys, army boots. I spent many a Saturday thrift-shopping for the perfect ugly flannel.

Towards the end of the grunge period, the movie Clueless was released. One of my favorite lines is when Cher says something like, "Guys roll out of bed, put on their baggy pants, cover their greasy hair with a backwards cap, and we're expected to swoon? As if!"

So, I thought that today's youth had broken free of this seemingly never-ending cycle of ill-fitting garb. After all, there was the logo-print trend, the low-rise pants revolution, and the demystifying of the thong panty. Britney Spears and NSync were the poster-children of high self-esteem and self-respect. People were no longer hiding their bodies behind layers of cloth

However, something has gone terribly wrong and I was confronted with this harsh reality at the Bright Eyes concert earlier this week. Never before had I seen so many people gathered in one place who tried so hard to look homeless. Guys were wearing faux-vintage blazers adorned with carefully placed pins and buttons over faux-vintage t-shirts, some with clever sayings, and meticulously mussed hair. The girls looked like faximilies of the Olsen Twins - pretty girls putting a lot of effort into making themselves look unatractive.

Who is to blame for this Britney-school-girl backlash? Heck, even Britney herself has climed aboard this fashion train wreck. Is the trucker hat to blame, or is this an inevitable rebellion against the label-whoreing days of the early-"aughties"? I for one, am going to try my best to sit this one out.