Millennials, Look Away: Gen Z Influencers Are Bringing Y2K Style Back
Michael Cothran, Tea’ Maisel-Chmaj
Influencers like Michaila Cothran and Tea’ Maisel-Chmaj have blown up on TikTok by making #Y2KStyle their personal brand.
Their jeans are low, their purses are small, their hairstyles are spiky, and they appreciate the power of body glitter. Introducing the hottest new fashion influencers on TikTok: the Y2K girls.
If you weren’t aware, Y2K, or early 2000s, style is officially back. I’m talking halter tops, baby tees, and claw clips. Think pink velour jacket with a miniskirt and Uggs, maybe even a newsboy hat. The trend, popularized by Gen Z icons like Bella Hadid, has been gaining traction since last summer, but, as Vogue declared earlier this month, it has now “become so pervasive that calling it a trend feels like an understatement.” Nylon recently discovered that “popcorn tops,” made of that scrunchy, 3D fabric, are back. Popcorn tops!
For some, though, the 2000s aesthetic isn’t just a trend — it’s a lifestyle. Influencers like Michaila Cothran and Tea’ Maisel-Chmaj have blown up on TikTok by making #Y2KStyle their personal brand, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers with videos featuring straight-out-of-2002 outfits of the day, re-creations of iconic 2000s looks like Britney Spears’ “dump him” fit, rating decades-old beauty products like Maybelline’s Cool Effects eyeshadow, and tutorials showing how to put your hair in spiky buns. In a 2021 report, Trendalytics reported that searches for Y2K fashion were up 193% compared to the previous year, attributing the trend to the simultaneous rise of TikTok and new interest in 2000s celebrities.
“I think many people would agree that pop culture peaked in the year 2000,” Abbie Porter, a 20-year-old TikToker from England who also sells Y2K vintage clothes online, told me.
“I feel like the 2000s was about just having fun,” Cothran, a 23-year-old creator living in Nashville, said. “There weren’t any rules. You could wear pointless scarves in the summertime and put a dress over your jeans, and it was considered cool.”
These influencers’ love of the era is partly an embrace of the carefree vibe it represents and partly nostalgia for their childhoods.
sweatshirts 2001, so the time I was growing up was the peak of 2000s style, with iconic celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie taking the center stage of fashion,” said Porter, who has more than 60,000 TikTok followers. “Now as an adult, re-creating these outfits creates a really nostalgic feeling for me personally, which I think a lot of people in my age group can relate to.”
“I think quarantine had a play into the styles coming back due to [the] class of 2020 romanticizing their childhood because of how fast it was lost. I know I wasn’t the only one binge-watching Mean Girls,” Maisel-Chmaj, a college student from Southern California, told me. “I think when we were stuck in time inside our houses during the pandemic, all we could do was look back.”
Maisel-Chmaj’s love for the turn of the millennium has made her a star on TikTok, where she has branded herself as a “2000s It girl.” Nearly 600,000 people have followed her since she started posting videos about her love of Y2K fashion. The 19-year-old started out on TikTok by posting about thrifting. Maisel-Chmaj said she naturally gravitated toward the ’90s and 2000s clothing at thrift stores because she found them to be cute and high quality — she especially loved the glitter decals. She now works at a thrift store and sells the ’90s and 2000s fashion secondhand online on her own as well.
Her 2000s-themed “get ready with me” videos get the most views. In a recent video, she picks out a lime green low-rise skirt, a matching baby doll tank top, and a flower choker (she basically looks like Mandy Moore in the music video for “Candy”). In her comments, followers beg her for advice on how to find the perfect pair of lace-up Mudd jeans.
For Cothran, her pandemic hobby of experimenting with fashion turned into a career once she began embracing the Y2K style. She used to watch her mom, whom she called a “2000s queen,” get dressed when she was a child, and when she started posting about fashion on TikTok about a year and a half ago, she began to play around with some of her mom’s old clothing. Dressing in the style made her feel “more confident than I ever had,” and she wasn’t the only one who loved it. The more she posted about Y2K fashion, the more her views and following man on the moon iii
