Edit; I’m not asking what the 90s were like because I was there. I’m thinking what the pastiche of the 90s would be like should it have a revival like the 80s one that is nothing like the real 1980s by young people that presumably only have vague ideas from magazines and music and movies to go by. Like for example if it takes off from grunge but not like it was then but like it is idealised by kids today, what would it be like? What else was a 90s thing? Boy bands and indie pop mixed together on MTV? Hardcore techno and jungle/dnb with it’s own analogue distribution channels by mail, flyers, mixtapes? Last generation of B-movies with practical effects shot on film before that part of the industry degraded into C-tier on digital with terrible CGI in the 00s? Mainstream pop culture, whatever that was? Television and radio, magazines and records before the internet took off? How would any or all of that be reimagined by people that didn’t live it back then? I had no interest then nor do I have today for fashion magazines so if somebody knows I’d love to hear your twist on the topic.
It would be this.
Paper plates?
The same way 90s kids learned to dress like earlier generations. We learned it from the movies and TV reruns. We learned to dress like 50s greasers from Grease. We got our 60s and 70s hippy fashion sense from Cheech and Chong.
Grungy Hacker chic: See movies like Hackers (duh), Strange Days, The Matrix, Fight Club, The Crow, Blade, The Fifth Element, Tank Girl, etc. Tight fits. (You can spot the squares in this aesthetic by their baggy tracksuit fits). Lots of dark and dirty retro futurism stuff. Deliberate splashes of vibrant colors if anything other than black. Lots of strange materials you wouldn’t normally consider clothing. Did they literally pick that accessory out of the trash? Maybe. Eyeliner on everyone, even the boys, especially the sad boys. Big black boots.
For more normal stuff, see the fashions in Weekend at Bernies, Wayne’s World, Airheads, Bill and Ted’s Excellent and Bogus Journeys, Go, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Clerks, Friday, Point Break, My Cousin Vinny, White Men Can’t Jump, Bad Boys, Clueless, Empire Records, etc. Lots of baggy fits. Lots of flannel, usually layered over a T-shirt. Ripped Jeans. Mostly muted subdue colors, with occasional splashes of virbancy, like a loud tie on a brown suit. Big and often long hair on the boys (and no beards). Sneakers. Tracksuits. Typing this out, these styles seem way too real and not all that exaggerated.
And then very briefly, there was a flash of retro swing revival and everyone wanted to dress like Jim Carey in The Mask.
I guess younger imitators might try to throw all these styles in a blender and see what comes out. Flannel Goths. Bubblegum Neon Hackers. Zoot Track Suits. Ripped Jeans and literally garbage. No clothes at all, just rocking boots and their cyber deck/stim-suit like a princess from Mars as written by William Gibson.
It’d be Niravana done in the style of Phil Collins while the video shows a vhs recording of people partying on a beach in board shorts and bikinis flanked by skaters in JNCO jeans with POGs glued to their skateboards with a club in the background that’s called “The Edge”, which is brightly adorned with a combination of “that cup design” and the pastel RGBY in geometric shapes while inside its actually got a simultaneous jungle and future aesthetic.
I can actually visualize it just by reading this. Wow.
Surfers wearing bright pastels, talking like ninja turtles, all shot on cheap video cameras.
Surf ninjas!
I don’t know everything that would end up in it, but DayGlo shit would definitely be one of them.
Hell, the image of a stereotypical zoomer already looks like they are harkening back to the 90’s aesthetic.
I’d like to suggest wallet chains and Discman portable cd players get added whoever is making this list.
Oh yeah, I remember. But what would the kids do with this style if they were to adopt it?
My dad’s truck had something like that on the side, back in the 90s
I remember many a Ford Explorer with that on the side as well lol
Did you get this from the wall in the Taco Bell bathroom?
Paper plate and cup and also my old jacket and also the walls at the mall (that are totally, totally tall) lol
They’re tiny, they’re toony. They’re all a little looney!
And transparent home computer cases from companies trying to Imitate the iMac look, with colors named after fruits. I had a transparent green external hard drive…
The Scotland away shirt from 1992 can confirm:
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Don’t forget florescent triangles
A return to innocence, a return to …Enya!
And etno techno. Uuh.
I’ve sometimes seen the style attributed to the “Memphis Group,” but I don’t know enough about design history to flesh that out, confirm, etc. Example photo of some of their items from the Wiki:
This is about the only correct answer to the question in this thread.
I’ve got a fun option for where to start, windows media player skins
Most of this was the 2000s but what’s a little bit of misdating
Vaporwave is that
I’m thinking that vaporwave is a niche glitch aesthetics spinoff from the dial up experience.
Doc Martens and flannel. Can you smell the grunge?
What da fuck is Eddie Vetter saying anyway?
Ask the Swedish Chef
90s enjoyers have been just doin their thing all along
It’s kind of earlier, but a little bit would be casette futurism.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CassetteFuturism
A technological aesthetic reminiscent of mid-1970s to late 1990s tech (regardless of the real-time setting of the media) as codified by early microcomputers like the Altair 8800 and the IBM Personal Computer, late Cold War era technology, the iconic imagery of the mid to late space race, or the post-Cold War “end of history” period in The '90s, which was characterized by a fascination with virtual reality technologies (such as helmets) and 2D computer animation.
Whether it be the bold colors and geometric shapes, the tendency towards stark plainness, or the exotic-looking computers and proto-cell phones, it is clear that this is neither the Raygun Gothic of days past nor the Everything Is an iPod in the Future aesthetic that would follow, but a bridging point that contains elements of both styles.
Amazingly, nobody appears to have done a Wikipedia page for cassette futurism yet, or I’d link to that.
EDIT: Here’s a DDG link to an image search for cassette futurism, to sort of give an idea:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=cassette+futurism&iax=images&ia=images
That’s mostly synthwave aesthetic. Synthwave covers that same sort of stylistic convention as cassette futurism.
I’m so excited! I’m so excited! I’m so…scared!
