Roaring 2020s

When it comes to fashion, history repeats itself. The unspoken 20-year rule—the time it takes for a trend to die, then become fashionable again—predicts the way you’ll dress for the next decade. Thanks to the cyclical nature of fashion, many of this decade’s biggest trends are expected to draw styles from the late ’90s to early aughts. But there’s also been a lot of talk of the roaring 2020s—an idea of re-emerging into a post-COVID world a century after the debutantes danced the Charleston. Like everything else that’s back—from the reboot of Sex and The City, ’00s fashion icon Paris Hilton, the high-key PDA relationship of Bennifer and IRL fashion weeks— one thing for sure, fashion is back. And here are the comeback trends that are going to define the next decade of style.

- IAN LOH

HERITAGE REVIVAL

The last decade or so has seen some revivals of the “grand old dames” of fashion such as Balmain, Schiaparelli and Courregès. More recently, the “sleeping beauties”— dormant luxury brands with immense historical cachet yet with no current commercial activity—are undergoing a reawakening in the form of modern transformations led by a group of new-gen designers. Take Nina Ricci, for example, an haute couture house founded in 1932, who has appointed millennial designers Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh as creative directors in 2019. The Dutch design duo first burst into the scene with their menswear label Botter, known for deconstructing menswear infused with Caribbean warmth and elegance.

The duo has since brought similar methodologies to the couture house by the way of grounding couture memories in everyday expressions, often in silhouettes manifested in a “dressed” look disguising a fit and tactility native to sports or casualwear. Courregès—a Parisian house known for its space-age, futuristic designs in the ’60s—is now led by another young designer, Nicolas Di Felice. Instead of a design overhaul, one of the first things Di Felice did after arriving at the house was to reissue brand’s strongest pieces in a much more eco-responsible vinyl, claiming himself as “a creator with social and societal concerns.”