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Ugg boots. Low-rise jeans. Ballet pumps. I’ve looked on with varying levels of concern as the trends of my adolescence have been exhumed and reimagined for a younger generation. And every time another Noughties look has been reclaimed as desirable Y2K nostalgia, a voice in my head has whispered: “Please, whatever comes next, don’t let it be shorts and tights.”
For a stretch of the late Noughties, a period that roughly coincided with the premiership of Gordon Brown, layering miniature shorts over a pair of bog-standard black opaques was somehow deemed the height of cool (if you were young, female, fashion-obsessed and spent all your surplus income in Topshop). Alexa Chung wore shorts and tights with collared blouses that looked vaguely Parisian. Sienna Miller teamed them with floaty boho tops. The Gossip Girl girls modelled the look while strolling around New York’s Upper East Side, swapping plain black for colourful hosiery.
No one seemed to question the fact that the friction of polyester under denim (or worse, under another man-made fibre) wasn’t exactly the most comfortable sensation. Or mention the high risk of resembling a pantomime extra rather than a French person. Eventually, though, we collectively saw sense, and the trend became pretty much extinct as a new decade rolled around, aside from the odd reappearance on the Chanel catwalks, infrequent enough to shrug off. It seemed, like so many of the period’s sartorial horrors, to have been safely consigned to grainy digital photos in old Facebook albums.
But the trend cycle is inexorable. It has a habit of dredging up the ugliest fashion crimes from a couple of decades ago and presenting them as somehow fun and retro. So, inevitably, my prayers have failed, and the shorts-tights combo is now creeping its way back into the mainstream, one slippery, slightly laddered foot at a time.
“What’s particularly interesting is that many of those embracing the revival for Noughties fashion were babies – or weren’t even alive – during the era they are nostalgic for,” says Riani Kenyon, anthropologist and behavioural analyst at consumer insight agency, Canvas8. If I wasn’t already feeling decrepit, I certainly am now. The re-emergence of a trend such as this one is part of a phenomenon that Kenyon calls “‘fauxstalgia’, which is a romanticised version of the past only experienced through cultural references and curated aesthetics”.
Model Bella Hadid, one of the main instigators of fashion’s current Noughties revival, recently wore sheeny, low-denier tights under black hotpants while attending the launch of her latest brand collaboration. Singer and actor Suki Waterhouse has been papped in frayed denim cut-offs, tights and a massive fur coat, an outfit so 2009 that I had to triple check the date of the photo. Over on Instagram, fashion influencers are teaming their Molly Mae-style beige blazers with shorts and sheer tights. Chung, pioneer of shorts-tights 1.0, is revisiting the look she helped popularise almost two decades ago.
Ostensibly, the trend arose from a sort of concession to practicality. At the tail end of the Noughties, denim hot pants were the cutting edge of style: just think of Kate Moss at Glastonbury, wearing hers with Hunter wellies. But they posed a few practical problems for those of us living in the northern hemisphere – namely that unless you were on a beach holiday, wandering around with bare legs felt like the start of a cautionary tale about hypothermia. Layering your frayed cut-offs over a pair of tights ingeniously provided a veneer of protection against the elements (albeit a very thin, easily snaggable one) while retaining the same “cool” silhouette. Plus, shorts felt less aggressively, well, short when they were worn with hosiery.
In theory, it was a transitional look, one that could work on a slightly chilly summery day or an unseasonably warm autumn one. But really, it made little sense whatever the season; you’d either end up a bit too sweaty or risk freezing your thighs. At a festival in a changeable British climate, you could combine all those experiences into one joyful day; wellies and tights are a particularly toxic combination in damp weather, and I’m still surprised I managed to dodge trench foot at Leeds Festival 2009.
In spite of all this, super-short shorts over some 60 deniersbecame a ubiquitousoutfit formula. And it wasn’t just about denim, either. Moss’s debut Topshop line sold a yellow striped pair that were pretty much unwearable unless you toned them down with an under-layer. If you wanted to channel the vibe that’s since been christened“indie sleaze”? You could wear yourswith the violently cartoonish tights from House of Holland’s collaboration with Pretty Polly, which featured massive polka dots, stars and blocked out “suspender”-style shapes.
For something more breezy and boho?I had some floaty floral shorts from Urban Outfitters that I’d team with my least laddered pair of tights, telling myself that if I didn’t look quite as cool as Florence (whom I’d watched, soggy footed, at Leeds), I could maybe pass as a lost member of her Machine.I later discovered that my siblings had been calling said shorts “the pantaloons” behind my back.
Perhaps worst of all, though, was the “business casual” incarnation of the trend. I started studying for my A-Levels when the shorts-tights combo was at its zenith. At my sixth form, we were forced to wear “office” attire, allegedly to prepare us for the power-dressing world of work. This felt anachronistic even then, an Eighties hangover; school friends who’ve since evolved into hotshot lawyers now dress far more casually for the office than they ever did to loaf around the common room. Inevitably, we got creative, donning “city shorts” over our black opaques.
When do shorts become city shorts, you ask? When they’re essentially a pair of office trousers lopped off at the knee, that’s when. My classmates wore them in shades of grey, beige and greige, sometimes with a pinstripe or a check. The more fashion-forward variations would taper slightly as they reached the knee, lending the wearer the proportions of an aristo on a golfing weekend, especially if the shorts were teamed with, whisper it, a waistcoat (another inexplicable Noughties trend that has since risen from the dead). We were aiming for high-flying executive chic but looked like we were about to go on a mad one with Toad of Toad Hall.
Forgive me, then, for feeling ever so slightly cynical when I see fashion influencers trying to rebrand this unholy outfit combination as aspirational, understated and luxurious. They may be wearing their tiny shorts with pricier, shinier, ultra-sheer tights, rather than the sort of sensible, high denier basics you’d buy in bulk from Marks & Spencer. But the overall effect is still a strange mishmash of dressed-down and dressed-up, with odd, top-heavy proportions that are almost impossible to pull off. It’s a look that’s neither here nor there; essentially, you’re either wearing too many or too few clothes.
Perhaps for younger wearers, the appeal is in the nostalgic callback to a seemingly more innocent time of flip phones and MySpace. Anyone who lived it the first time around will know better, though: endless laddering and uncomfortable chafing will never be glamorous.
