Graphic by Sophia Flissler
I’m picking out which mini skirt to lounge in from my carefully curated collection (today’s selection is a beige cargo number) when my mind flashes to a memory of my first exposure to the infamous garment. Suddenly I’m no more than eight years old, and I’m sitting on the couch with my parents watching the more malicious 2000s predecessor of early YouTube ‘Fail’ videos: televised recordings of strangers who ‘fail’ in public.
That night’s episode was on what the narrator called ‘micro minis’, specifically featuring women caught on camera accidentally flashing the public in mini skirts. Look at these silly girls and their silly clothes, the male voice scoffed over a laugh track, look at how stupid they are. It was nothing short of public humiliation. I don’t remember whether their faces were censored, but the fact stands that these women were not only recorded without their knowledge, they had their bodies broadcast for millions to ridicule without their permission.
I grew up in the 2000s when low rise jeans, bedazzled tube tops and exposed thongs reigned supreme. They were trends I saw on older girls and longed to participate in, though I wasn’t fit to wear them by virtue of being a solid few years too young to go anywhere near a thong in the first place. Yet it wasn’t my age that deterred me from aspiring towards this type of self-expression—it was because my conservative environment taught me that I was being reared to be a good woman. A bad woman, a ‘tainted’ woman, was one who flaunted her assets with painted-on jeans held up by diamanté-studded belts, one who unabashedly showed miles of skin draped in minuscule bits of pink velour.
I yearned for the unapologetic femininity embodied by those older girls, who rocked leopard print and elaborate manicures—a declaration of caring about their looks, of wanting others to know that they’ve spent time in front of the mirror. I was steered away from following in their footsteps, not because the adults in my life wanted me to focus on making dirt pies and watching Disney Channel, but because they deemed those older girls frivolous and indecent, therefore inviting negative attention like catcalls (but whose fault is that?). I was to grow up to be a girl that covered up, to be a girl that had better things to do than worry about their ability to pick up something they’ve dropped in a micro mini skirt.
The correlation drilled into me was unmistakable. Women who showed off their bodies and communicated sexual agency through dress in any capacity were painted as vacuous, superficial and debased women who were unnecessarily preoccupied with the trivial things in life. But what’s trivial about being comfortable in the body you are in? About decorating it, flaunting it, and ultimately feeling good in it?
I bought my first pair of low rise jeans as an adult from a thrift shop last year, and my first lacy exposable thong followed. I got them in the throes of a particularly bad spell of body dysmorphia, and I was surprised to find that I couldn’t stop wearing them. After a certain point, the constant exposure of my stomach made me forget that it was out there. I began to see my stomach as a stomach, not as one either bigger or smaller, softer or more muscular than others. Just a stomach, period. My anxiety over appearing more fit and taut barely manifested, and I found myself unexpectedly embodying body neutrality.
The 2000s revival has as many opponents as it has enthusiasts, most of whom express concern that it will bring back the immense body scrutiny that especially targeted women. Their worries aren’t unfounded. Celebrities previously celebrated for their curves are publicly losing weight, Ozempic has skyrocketed in popularity as a weight loss drug and healthcare infrastructures worldwide are reporting a sharp rise in eating disorders among young people. But why must the values return with the clothes? The body trend with the fashion trend?
The inadvertent message I’m detecting is that protruding stomachs should be covered, that micro minis shouldn’t stretch across big thighs, that flabby arms shouldn’t frame butterfly tops. We are navigating an ambiguous cultural landscape where the fight for body diversity has led to curve models like Paloma Elsesser and Precious Lee gaining modern icon status, but the brands that dress them still don’t carry their sizes for regular people to access (e.g. the infamous Miu Miu S/S 2022 micro mini skirt was custom made for Paloma’s I-D cover, but the brand doesn’t provide the size in stores).
Whose standards of beauty are we honoring when we insinuate that bigger bodies should be tucked away, that the display of plump flesh is ‘unflattering’? This disdain of curves is inherently rooted in racism, where black and brown women’s bodies have been the site of racist propaganda marking curves as ‘proof’ of hypersexuality, of being the ‘other’—which is doubly ironic in the conversation about quintessential 2000s fashion, as the visual language begun in the black community in the first place.
The archive declares that low rise jeans could only be paired with an ultra flat stomach. But after all the work that we’ve done to combat these narrow perceptions of what an ‘acceptable’ body looks like, shouldn’t it encourage us to imagine that anybody could wear anything? Using clothes from the archive on bodies that were purposefully left out of the original conversation is an act of continually rewriting the narrative of beauty and self-expression. Where we refuse to be dictated by boundaries set by those in power meant to exclude and belittle us, where we reclaim it and make it our own. So fuck the archive, wear your low rise jeans out to lunch and let them see all that skin.