Perhaps what Gen Z is most renowned for is making skinny jeans again unfashionable. As Gen Z grew older, the trend shifted away from millennials' preference for increasingly tight and cropped denim, and toward longer, looser silhouettes like cargo trousers and baggy jeans. "The most common requests [from Gen Z clients] for street style and everyday wear are loose-fitting and oversized," says stylist and creative director Danyul Brown, whose clientele includes model Amelia Gray.
According to Brannigan, "Gen Z likes to play around with their proportions a bit more with oversized clothing." Brannigan advises contrasting more large pieces with more fitting clothing when styling them. It's simple to abide by the guideline "little shirt, big pants, or little pants, bigger shirt." If you want to go a little more, Brannigan suggests wearing big jeans with an enormous shirt rather than a T-shirt that comes up quite high on the neck, scooping your collarbone, or pulling up your sleeves to reveal your wrist.
Y2K Revival
First, the 1990s made a comeback, bringing bucket hats, slip dresses, and baby tees back into style. Then came the Y2K renaissance, which saw women all over the world pulling Juicy Couture sweatsuits out of storage, waistlines falling, and pastel-colored sunglasses making a comeback. Addison Rae and Bella Hadid were spotted wearing Ed Hardy, Julia Fox made news for her pubic bone-bearing leggings, and Ice Spice had a unique Baby Phat outfit that looked like it was from the early 2000s while walking the Grammy red carpet.
Gropper and O'Connell draw attention to the recent comeback of early aughts companies like Tommy Hilfiger and Coach. The parent company of Coach disclosed in a 2023 sales report that Gen Z customers boosted their Coach spending by 25% year over year. And Coach is doing the same in return. Gropper and O'Connell claim that the talent that the company has selected to represent it, such as Ariana Greenblatt, Dove Cameron, and Lil Nas, "exemplifies their shift towards catering to a Gen Z audience."
Reimagining the 2010s
Gen Z is now looking to the 2010s for motivation. Pinstripes and pantsuits are being rebranded as corpcore and the office siren style by the generation that grew up with the explosion of remote work. "They're mixing oversized blazers (which have grown 25% year over year in sales) and incorporating menswear-inspired pieces," Wagner explains. (Many millennials have advised against it on TikTok, shivering as they remember the days of statement necklaces and pencil skirts.) Even peplums, which dominated the 2023 runways and the 2024 red carpets, are making a reappearance.
Athletic Inspiration
Gen Z isn't scared to combine several styles in one outfit. Additionally, because they grew up during the athleisure revolution, they don't mind mixing in sporting features in unexpected areas. Dresses look well with Adidas Sambas, more formal, feminine shirts work well with track trousers and sports shorts, and tennis skirts go with everything. A new age of sports merchandise, notably jerseys, within fashion is also being ushered in by internet-born trends like the "blokecore" look, which draws inspiration from soccer.
Trompe L'oeil
Gen Z also has a tendency to like deceptive designs. There are several styles that resemble drawings. Clothes that use trompe l'oeil, a technique in art where two-dimensional items are made to appear three-dimensional, are what Chernyaev refers to as clothing that manipulates perception.