Gaudy and Gleeful, Early 2000s Fashion Is Making a Comeback

 Antipathy for the decade’s celebrities — particularly the young women, including Hilton, Lohan and Spears, who had only recently been anointed as its idols — was at its peak, with tabloids and gossip blogs making vicious sport of their public drubbings. This “meeting of the minds,” as The Post also described it, marked both the pinnacle and the beginning of the end of this period: the so-called McBling era, an exuberantly trashy coda to the Y2K years that lasted from roughly 2000 to 2008 and was characterized by trucker hats, fake tans and pubis-baring velour tracksuits. 

If fashion leading up to the new millennium aspired to an iridescent, digitized new day, McBling (its name a nod to the flashy logomania that was then prevalent) came stumbling downstairs the morning after, hung over and hiding behind a pair of pink Baby Phat aviators. The former style — punctuated by cargo pants, strappy tops and white eye shadow — was an optimistic, if superficial, exploration of how the future might look; the latter led, in every direction, toward unabashed bad taste.

 “Fashion at the time had a sense of humor about itself,” says the British designer Christian Cowan, who was born in 1994 and whose runway shows Hilton has walked in twice. “It was about being perfect, fake and bright. Everyone knew it was kind of shallow.”