2010s Fashion | How ‘Random’ Became ‘Authentic’ (Deep-Dive)

Video Description

Hi everyone!

In today's video, we're going to discuss the fashion of my favorite decade: the 2010s.

The 2010s are my favorite decade because of how it represents freedom and self-expression.

But beneath the bright colors and bold patterns that never matched, the 2010s was about encouraging customers to dress to express themselves.

However, this wasn't done entirely for the sake of authenticity.

Outside factors like the 2008 recession and pop-culture influenced what customers were willing to buy and fashion brands adapted their designs and marketing to meet this demand.

The effects created an incredible era in fashion history which is why I'm so excited to share this video with you.

As always, be sure to let me know what you think and what your thoughts on the 2010s are!

Most importantly, I hope you have a wonderful day and thank you so much for watching!

🧡🧡🧡

Video Transcript

Hi everyone, I’m Joshua Miller and welcome to my YouTube channel. Because style is my favorite subject, today I want to talk about my favorite fashion decade and that’s the 2010s. In this video, I’m going to be talking about what inspired the style and core themes of the 2010s economically and culturally. And I’m also going to be talking about what are the main themes of this era of fashion are and why I think the 2010s will arguably make a reappearance in fashion in the coming years.

I’m just so excited to talk to you guys about the 2010s because this is without a doubt my favorite fashion era and also my favorite decade. At its core, the 2010s is about celebrating who you are and not being afraid to color outside of the lines. And I just find that to be really inspiring and it’s something that I feel like is sometimes missing in fashion nowadays.

Self-expression is such a core value of mine, which is why this decade is so important to me. But at its core, the 2010s was about celebrating who you are and not being afraid to color outside of the lines or do something that might be labeled as cringe. It was all about just being yourself and being open to new things, which is why I find it so inspiring and why I really want to talk about it today.

But to understand this period of fashion, we first need to start by discussing the macroeconomic conditions that led up to it. When discussing 2010’s fashion, something I feel like people sometimes forget to do is to talk about the significant events that led up to that period. And to me, the most important thing by far was the 2008 recession.

The 2008 recession had a huge impact on the fashion industry because it changed the way that people buy things and what it was that people were even willing to buy. For starters, the recession created a large degree of job insecurity and fear of job insecurity, which made people more reluctant to spend money on things that are unessential, like fashion. As a consequence, retail employment dipped 6.6% during this period of time, and fashion sales dipped around 5% as well.

This was incredibly scary for fashion brands because obviously if customers aren’t spending money, they might go out of business. So I’d like to imagine that fashion-forward businesses like Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom—in those executive boardrooms—they were constantly talking about how they were going to get people to buy new things.

Thankfully, the leaders of the fashion industry eventually figured out that it wasn’t that people didn’t want to buy clothes, they just needed to be sold them differently. And that is where the 2010s truly kicked off.

As the recession ended and the economy began to recover, customers were still reluctant to spend their money on brand new outfits because it just felt like it was hard to keep up with what the new trends were. And notice how I said that customers were reluctant to buy entire outfits, not new items. This distinction is really important to cater to customers that wanted to buy something new—just not everything new.

Fashion brands figured out a way to get people to buy new things, and that was by convincing them that as long as they were wearing at least one new piece at a time that fit with the clothes they already had, they were fashionable because it was authentic and because it was you.

Whether it was a colorful pair of sunglasses, a pair of mismatched socks, or wearing a skirt over a pair of jeans, this era slowly became defined by being random. Because again, if customers were incentivized to just buy one thing new and wear it with whatever else they wanted, they were more likely to buy things.

And customers took to this. Eventually, random became just the norm. Put simply, being random had become cool.

I feel like this is best evidenced by the children’s TV show of the 2010s Shake It Up. If you look at the clothing from the show Shake It Up, everything about it seems to suggest freedom, fun, and just letting yourself do whatever you want in the name of being yourself. The clothes they wear are bright, they’re colorful, and the only rule that they follow is that there are no rules.

As a kid, I found this super inspiring. Even the name of the show seems to suggest this theme: Shake it up is literally telling its viewers to take whatever they think of as normal and shake it up and make it different in the name of being yourself.

From the lens of a fashion retailer, having customers like doing this could not have been better. If parents were worried they were going to have to buy their kid an entire new outfit every single time they walked into a clothing store, they were going to be more reluctant to spend money on clothes. But because the theme of the decade was about wearing whatever you wanted, parents could take their kids to the store and they could pick out virtually anything—and as long as it was new, they knew it would fit with whatever their kid wanted to wear.

Children’s clothing followed the same theme: bright colors, mismatched prints, skirts on top of jeans on top of leggings, weird hats—it was chaotic and fun. And that chaos was profitable.

To summarize: as long as the clothing was new and it got attention, kids were happy, and as long as it was affordable, parents were willing to buy it.

So how did random become aesthetic in 2010s fashion? The recession made customers reluctant to spend. Brands panicked. And then they invented a trend—random dressing—that made people feel comfortable buying new things again.

Fashion is never just about clothes. It’s about selling a feeling. In the 2010s, the feeling was freedom, ease, and expression without overspending.

What I love about the 2010s is that it’s proof of how far fashion can go if we stop taking everything so seriously and stop enforcing rules that don’t need to be there. I ache for these things to come back in style, and when I look at fashion and pop culture now, it kind of feels like they might.

As a kid, my teachers always said history repeats itself. In fashion, this is true. The 2010s have a lot in common with the 1980s. The 2020s feel like the 1990s. Y2K is back. With albums like Brat reviving 2000s aesthetics and artists like Tate McRae getting Britney Spears comparisons, the 2000s are the new macro culture. So the 2010s might naturally follow.

Given fashion’s repetition and how consumers already buy fast, cheap, and randomly, it’s not far-fetched to predict that the 2010s will return in the next 5–10 years.

And I’m really excited for this. I want fashion to be a place where people feel free to express their most authentic, confident selves. The 2010s embodied that.

What about you? Do you think 2010s fashion is coming back? What parts are you excited or not excited for? Let me know in the comments. I love talking to you guys about fashion and I’m excited to hear your thoughts.

If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe. I post new videos every Sunday and daily short-form content. Follow me on Instagram and TikTok at JoshuaMiller. Most importantly, have a fantastic day and thank you so much for watching.

[Laughter] That’s the blooper. Yeah, that’s the one.

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