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n 2007, Lindsay Lohan got arrested 4 times. Britney Spears checked herself into rehab and the iPhone debuted. Amy Winehouse was still alive and singing, and the fashion world was saturated with low rise jeans and sequined page boy caps. One year later, the housing bubble blew up, the stock market crashed and with it, an era of Juicy Couture track suits and all the newest Gucci handbags. Suddenly, it was cooler to thrift your Balenciaga coat than it was to buy the latest one— who had the money, anyway? In keeping with our theme of liminality, the 2010s have been a strange time for fashion: hyperfuturistic but also nostalgic (we see you, Lisa Frank), and rife with a strange combination of the two. The previously K-mart savvy brand Champion is the new Gucci, and the rise of stars like Billie Eilish feature a new blend of emo, skater boy and logo print. The enmeshing of all of these styles is chaotic. And looking at the timeline of the cultural moment of the 2010s, well, it’s not hard to see why. Reflecting on the 2010s is an emotional rollercoaster. Back in 2012 and 2013, we have the rise of luxe comfort (even with the death of the Juicy tracksuit) with Isabel Marant’s wedge sneaker. Take it all the way to the present, this trend has persisted from the runway (see any of Virgil Abloh’s latest runway shows) to the classroom (see any girl with her chunky FILA sneakers ((no tea no shade)). The juxtaposition here of formal and informal, comfort and style, is a definitive trend of the 2010s, a strange
in-between not expressed as starkly in any decade until now. Another very popular trend in the 2010s is nudity. Nudity has always been popular but the rise of the nude body and discretely placed lacey dresses over it is a newer trend in the runway- and in pop culture at large. Everywhere from Bella Hadid on the runway last May, to the naked selfie of Kim Kardashian in 2016, emboldened female nudity is everywhere in pop culture. Perhaps the difference here between, say, Kim Kardashian and Marilyn Monroe pulling her dress down, or Twiggy and Farrah Fawcett in the ‘90s with their bare ribs and dark eyes, is the amount of agency that is given to the girls on the runway and on their social media platforms. Fashion has been disseminated in so many different ways throughout time and in the 2010s the main conduit was social media. What does this do to the female body, so constantly objectified and scrutinized, when women are given that front-facing camera and a faceless, yawning audience? The answer might be, wear a nude dress. Jumping forward to some trends we have seen in the past five years or so, we move toward the technologization and digitization of fashion- the Tumblr girl and, in the past year, the e-girl. These trends are more focused on high school and middle schoolaged girls: dyed hair, pastels, fake freckles, schoolgirl skirts, anything borrowed from Japanese and Harajuku culture, rosy cheeks,
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