The Nineties Were Bright
The thing about the nineties is how much was allowed to exist at the same time. The eighties had their dark glamour and bad hair, the two thousands became this beige nightmare of minimalism and taupe everything, but the nineties? Anything went. Fluorescent, clashing, maximalist, sincere, ironic, earnest—it was all acceptable. You could be terrible and it didn’t matter because everyone was terrible in a different way.
There was something genuine about that maximalism that you don’t get now. Smiley faces pressed into everything, this sense that more color, more logos, more of everything was unambiguously good. The music was digital and enthusiastic, the fashion was loud, the early web was unfinished and you could see the cables showing. None of it was trying to be tasteful. It was just optimistic.
Now the generation that actually lived through it has money and buying power, which is how we get to where we are—every brand pulling from that archive because it sells. Reebok’s doing it, everyone else is doing it. Heritage sneakers coming back, oversized tracksuits, that whole vocabulary of excess. It works because that era wasn’t trying to be cool. It was just loud.
The weird thing is that these revivals feel more authentic than anything being designed fresh. A Reebok from 1995 meant something different than a reissue now—one was the thing itself, and one is nostalgia wearing the thing’s clothes. But the original had this absolute conviction that more was better. Bigger logos, brighter colors, chunkier shoes, fewer apologies.
I get the appeal now. Not because I want to be a teenager again, but because there was something fearless about that decade, even if the fear was just about looking ridiculous. Which you did. Which everyone did. And nobody cared.