Smells Like Teen Spirit

If I could pick a soundtrack for the best years of my life it would be full of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Jane's Addiction, Radiohead and maybe a little bit of Aerosmith just for some good old classic rock n' roll.  Similarly, if you were to compile a list of fashion must haves for me, both then and now, distressed jeans, plaid shirts, Converse All Stars and boy shirts would probably do it.  Maybe some red lipstick for special occasions. 

I'm a 90s child.  A grunge baby.  An angsty teen turned angsty adult.  And while my style has been refined, streamlined, adapted for the world of being a grown up, the core of my fashion sense still lays somewhere back in middle and high school, back in 90s NYC, sitting on stoops or trying to get into CBGBs with a fake ID.  To this day, Kurt Cobain is my number one fashion icon.  The stripes, the huge sunglasses, the not-quite-bell-bottom jeans and that stringy two-toned blond hair. 

Although I try to march to the beat of my own drummer, I have often been confronted with situations where plaid shirts and boyfriend jeans would appear juvenile, a touch unprofessional, and even downright inappropriate.  I have spent most of my post-grunge years resigned to the fact that the 90s are over and the clothes that are my very favorites must be relegated to weekends and nights.  So imagine my pure delight when I woke up one morning and...well...the 90s were back!!!  Not the real 90s.  The neo 90s.  The modern 90s.  With designers like Marc Jacobs and Alexander Wang at the helm, the 90s have gotten a 2013 makeover.

 

Once again, plaid and stripes rule, denim is a little bit more relaxed, and bending the rules (and sometimes your gender) is once again considered stylish.  The runways are filled with examples of the new 90s, where new takes on both punk and grunge combine with braided hair and bright red lipstick for a delightfully fresh take on what was an enormously important era in the world of music and fashion. 

One of the biggest improvements in grunge dressing these days, what really sets it apart and makes it more mature and more timeless, is tailoring.  No longer is distressed denim actually falling apart.  No longer is the perfect plaid flannel perpetually six sizes too big and, therefore, perpetually sloppy. You can dress androgynously without people actually wondering what sex you are.  Designers are making clothes that look exactly how I, for one, wanted them to look in the 90s, but could never quite find.  When I look at Mother's Slacker Fray jeans (pictured), I am reminded of the too-big jeans my friends and I used to punch extra holes in our belts to wear because they had the perfect flare at the cuff and the perfect amount of wear and tear around the knees.  Mother's Slackers are the jeans of my high school dreams.  They look effortless and cheeky and like they fit perfectly because you're so cool that there isn't an item of clothing on earth that wouldn't fit you perfectly. Back then we would labor away to get our jeans to look lived in, tough, destroyed, careless, and now (insert squeals of delight) you can just buy them!  So go dig up some Chuck Taylors and a goth inspired necklace, ditch the blow-dryer for a day or two (you can do it, I believe in you) and get ready to just be oh-so-cool again without even hardly trying.