Let Us Millennials Have Our Skinny Jeans

Why does the Internet think they need to tell us how to dress?

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Millennials can’t win.

First, we were blamed for the death of every industry imaginable. Now, it feels like every day on the Internet, Gen Z is policing everything we do. There are listicles about which emojis we should stop using; articles and essays about things we do that are “cringe,” like using GIFs; TikToks and Instagram reels dissecting our fashion choices and giving us “makeovers” which, as one fellow Millennial wonderfully commented, resemble the way our dads dressed in the nineties.

The jury is still out regarding whether or not Gen Z is truly this invested in Millennial habits, which don’t affect them at all, or if it’s an easy way to generate clicks and, therefore, ad revenue. To be fair to Gen Z, I’m leaning towards the latter, but either way, the daily bombardment of content about what Gen Z thinks I should be doing is exhausting.

I have neither the time nor the energy, or really any desire at all, to keep track of the harmless things Millennials are supposed to stop doing, and I desperately need someone — anyone — to realize how stupid this all is.

Every generation is bound to criticize the ones that came before it, and those of us on the receiving end are bound to roll our eyes and grumble. But it’s incredibly frustrating and exhausting to be bombarded with criticism after criticism of things that don’t affect anyone — and if they do, it’s only annoying, not truly harmful. How people in their thirties and older dress and express themselves online has no real impact on the life of someone in their twenties or younger.

But more importantly, Gen Z’s thoughts on fashion, in particular, and the obsession with “Millennial makeover” content, seem predicated by the idea that style trends are dictated by the young and those of us in our thirties and forties want to hold on to our own youth through dressing the same way and keeping up with style trends.

And while that may have been true at one time, Millennials, in particular, seem to be driven by personal taste and an understanding of what styles they feel are flattering. I speak from personal experience when I say the battle to discover one’s personal style can be hard-won, and Millennials are not — I am not — about to give that up because someone on Instagram said certain pieces look “old” or “outdated.”

I’m not alone. The overwhelming response in the comments to these pieces is that we Millennials don’t want to dress like Gen Z. Rather than worry about what’s on trend, we’ve figured out what we actually like and feel good wearing and regurgitated styles from the nineties aren’t it.

Right alongside those Millennial makeover videos are videos of Millennials reacting to the styles of our teens and early twenties trickle back onto store shelves — styles that remind us of a specific time in our lives and styles we’re not eager to revisit. Teenagers and twenty-somethings are free to have their crop tops and baggy jeans and love them, but most of us in our thirties and forties don’t want them.

And that’s fine — not because there’s something wrong with the style, although admittedly, I don’t like it — but because we don’t want to dress like teenagers and twenty-somethings. Even if we were to follow these trends, we’d get dragged for trying to look younger than we are.

And this is all to say nothing of the cyclical nature of fashion and how styles come back every fifteen to twenty years, or the problematic world of fast fashion, or the unsustainable, expensive practice of purging out-of-style pieces which will be stylish again in the not-too-distant future. In another ten to twenty years, we’ll be watching as our current “cringe” ways of dressing come back into style. The skinny jeans I refuse to part with now will make a comeback eventually.

If I learned anything from my emo phase in high school, it was to be unapologetically myself. If I couldn’t be convinced that I should dress the way others wanted me to, I certainly wouldn’t be now.