STYLES WE CAN LEAVE IN THE LAST DECADE..

by Brendan Sullivan, found on tfs


The worst of the 2000's...

As we clean up the champagne glasses and confetti from Fashion Spot Headquarters, we though we'd take one last look at the decade.
Honestly, the last decade was very good for fashion. We saw the rise of young men wearing their actual pants-size. Women were encouraged to wear dresses that made them look like women and not like Janet Reno. But there were some casualties.

1. Skinny Jeans. You're either skinny and wearing jeans, or not. Don't make it the pants' decision.
2. I am not the first, but I hope I'm the last to point out that the name says it all: Uggs.

3. Pretty much any overly constructed bra from Victoria's Secret. Ten years ago most women did not look like they were made by Matell. Victoria's Secret's nine-part, half-padding, décolletage-against-your-throat is the housing-crisis of fashion. If we learned anything in the past ten years, it's that when you try and turn nothing into something, you get left with nothing. Also, when I see teenage girls wearing "Team Pink" pajamas and sportswear in public, it makes me feel about seventy years old.

4. I don't have anything bad to say about the Twilight world and the rise of tween culture that happened last decade. The only thing that did was make a gaggle of middle-aged women think that being a teenager is somehow not awkward, embarrassing, or boring. There's nothing wrong with something that gets thousands of non-readers to pick up a book (with the exception of Scientology). It's probably a lot healthier a fantasy to inhabit than whatever we were doing in the nineties before Harry Potter came along. That's all. No judgement here.
5. Just kidding. Vampire-style is hideous. It's like the Ed Hardy of culture.

6. Also, hip teenagers? What on earth will you have to strive for if you're never cooler than your facebook status in ninth grade? When you're done dancing around in a circle, why don't you yank those sparkling shoes off your feet and get out there and mow the lawn so you guys can buy some more sunglasses, Mikey.

7. The only thing worse than watching the housing crisis put more Americans further away from their dream of owning their own homes: watching these awful real estate companies vie for buyers with amenities and the rise of booby-amenities. Yesterday I looked at an apartment that included "pied-à-terre service" which offered "housekeeping, fridge-stocking, and video rental" and I wondered whether I was getting a condo or a husband. The only good news is that now you can buy a million dollar studio apartment on the water with virtual-golf in the basement (and now we know that at least we've found the last corporation desperate enough to still sponsor Tiger Woods).
8. Okay, American Apparel, you have won us over with your cheeky attitude towards what looks suspiciously like Gap clothing. I no longer remember where else to buy primary-colored sweatshirts. But can you please work on starting an ad campaign where the men don't look like record store clerks and the women don't look kidnapped?

9. Crackberry accessories. Everything created in the last ten years from Research in Motion is already the ugliest accessory available, and men who are incessantly checking their blackberries in the company of women may as well be clutching a Gameboy. Blackberry, you were complicit in the housing crisis and the collapse of Bear Sterns, and now who are Accenture, AT&T, and Nike going to use as a pitch-man? Shame on you, Blackberry.

10. No one has ever looked good from a tanning bed. It gives you such an even color that you look like you have an especially gross form of jaundice. In the final months of the decade, a women's group rallied against a proposed tax on Botox, saying that it unfairly penalized women who apparently need to look like a more-stoic version of Queen Elizabeth to get ahead in this world. Instead, they agreed to start taxing tanning beds. Our grandchildren will note that we took the greatest leap forward in technology history and used it to ignore two wars and a financial collapse - instead, we were Tweeting about these kind of embarrassments.

Before we go back to work today and begin exherting the effort that is necessary to put the world back together, I would just like to add one more word about the biggest problem we had in the last ten years and that is "experts." Dan Rather was the most trusted name in news until a blogger "didn't think" that a document aired on the show looked like it was made on the kind of typewriter they used. Then again, after being fed most of the terrible music on the radio all decade, we ended up with Lady Gaga, who taught herself how to play and taught the rest of us how to be famous.

This was the first decade where the American diaspora - that spread us into cities and suburbs and sent many of us hundreds of mile from home - was reconnected through the power of Facebook and crackberries and digital photos. It took us a long time to get over the self-consciousness that goes along with being broadcast in high-def all day and having your coworkers know what bathing suit you wore on your honeymoon. We tried to make up for it with sunglasses and broadcasting our collective love for Twilight, and how we felt after the latest episode of Mad Men. We can be forgiven for thinking we're not as skinny as that girl we barely talked to in high school (who apparently wears her wedding dress year-round?) or tan enough or we don't have the right American Apparel sweatshirt. But it's still no excuse for wearing Uggs.

amen!