I’ll just be over here in my Nothern Reflections cat T-shirt

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/01/2023 (1356 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’ve never felt more like an Elder Millennial than when the Washington Post this week heralded the return of the “Going Out Top,” the top that defined the 2000s. The top of my formative years. The top of my youth.

Some of you are probably like, “What is a Going Out Top?” Don’t overthink it: it’s a top you wore to, uh, go out. But that’s what made it such a canny piece of clothing. It was a wardrobe workhorse precisely because it was a ubiquitous, ready-to-wear, cheap-to-acquire solution to an age-old sartorial problem.

The Going Out Top always had a lot going on. It was ruched. It was sparkly. It was ruched and sparkly. It was bejeweled or begrommeted. It was a tube top, unless it was a vest worn as a top. It was a jewel-toned off-the-shoulder tunic, or it was a lacy camisole layered under another camisole (in fact, there exists an entire sub genre of 2000s top called “the layering tank”). The Going Out Top had to have “visual interest” which is 2000s-speak for “weird neckline.”

The Going Out Top, and this is key, was always, always paired with a low-rise boot-cut jean or flare — and, if you were going out in Winnipeg in wintertime, a road-salt-encrusted pointy-toe boot or, ugh, Uggs.

To really make a sartorial statement, we donned our entire necklace collections and strapped a WWE championship-sized belt over the whole disaster. It was a different time.

Only now, it’s now. Gen Z is bringing the concept back, albeit with its own (less belt-forward) twist. I’d noticed the Going Out Top’s return, too. “Going out top” is once again a section on many fast-fashion retailer’s websites. Nostalgia-based digital content creators of a certain age have been affectionately lampooning it.

Its comeback is not surprising: trends tend to cycle every 20 years, which means the inevitable return of Y2K style is right on schedule.

The revival of the Going Out Top also dovetails with the fact that people are, once again, going out — and it could also be an accidental byproduct of Zoom, when we were once again only paying attention to the top of an outfit.

Live long enough and trends from your youth will come back, reworked, a few times.

I’m sitting this one out. Children, you may have the Going Out Top. I marvel at the millennials who still have a few of their vintage (I said what I said) Going Out Tops kicking around. I got rid of all of mine — my favourite was, brace yourselves, a gold lamé bubble-hem tunic with a plunging neckline that I definitely purchased at an outlet mall — because the 2000s were… not my favourite era in fashion.

The Going Out Top always felt like a costume for me. I felt most at home in a T-shirt and jeans. When the rise of jeans started going up to my ribcage and dressing like Jerry Seinfeld (a.k.a. normcore) was in, I rejoiced.

But I’d be lying if the Going Out Top didn’t make me nostalgic for a time when life was just a shapeless lump of clay to be moulded, all glimmering possibility. Your career, your relationships, your personal style — none of that was locked in yet.

And on the personal style file, the Going Out Top was, for better or worse, an important rite of self-expression. The Going Out Top was a lot of things — too many things, really — but it was never, ever boring. And after seasons and seasons dominated by minimalist athleisure, shackets (a portmanteau of jacket and shirt), and white sneakers, I found myself missing not the clothes themselves, but sense of whimsy, adventure and experimentation that all the Sex and the City-style, cosmopolitan-drinking Carrie Bradshaw acolytes brought out in 2004. Carrie Bradshaw, who once wore a belt over her bare midriff.

But that image of belted bare midriff is the reason many millennials, now in their 30s and early 40s, are casting a wary eye to the revival of 2000s style, since trend revivals dictate what is available for all of us to buy.

The Going Out Top, the low-rise jeans, all of it has some serious body-image baggage attached to it. See a 2022 headline in Glamour: “If You Survived the Early 2000s Without Body Issues, Congratulations.”

And it’s worth considering the messed-up fact that it’s not just women’s clothing that goes in and out of style, but women’s actual bodies. “Heroin chic,” itself a disgusting phrase, was replaced by “tanned and toned,” was replaced by Kardashian Kurves, which are now being replaced by… “heroin chic” again, at least according to a New York Post article from late last year.

Google “buccal fat removal” and tell me that thin-worship isn’t trying to stage its comeback tour.

*Extremely Carrie Bradshaw voice* I can’t help but wonder: will the return of low-rise jeans also command the relentless pursuit of “abs” that accompanied it the last time? The early 2000s were keenly fatphobic; diet culture was normalized. “Body positivity” was not on our radars; fashion was not size-inclusive (and it still has a long way to go).

In other words, will more than the Going Out Top be revived here?

Maybe Gen Z will do it better than we did. Maybe they will take the good parts of Y2K fashion — the irreverence and experimentation, like Portia on White Lotus — and leave the rest. Maybe they will resist the siren song of diet culture, of thinness at all cost.

I hope so. But allow this Elder Millennial to say what absolutely no one said to us: you do not have to have a certain body to wear a certain thing. You can participate (or not) in any trend you want.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com