2020s: Comfort and Nostalgia

Two forces have shaped fashion so far this decade, and both trace back to the pandemic years at the start of it. The first is a lasting shift toward comfort - pajama-adjacent pieces, sweatpants, and athleisure holding on as normal daywear long after lockdowns ended, extending rather than reversing the previous decade's athleisure turn. The second is nostalgia running on a much shorter loop than any previous decade managed: late-1990s and 2000s styles - low-rise jeans, logo pieces, the exact silhouette this site's own 2000s entry covers - came back into circulation within twenty years rather than the usual generational gap, driven largely by social media rather than runway shows. Alongside that revival, a "quiet luxury" reaction set in against decades of visible branding: understated, well-made pieces without a logo in sight, prized for construction quality over recognizability.

What's different about this decade, sewing-wise, isn't really a new technique - it's pace. Microtrends now move and die within a single social media cycle, which is a strange thing to sit with as someone documenting techniques that take a lifetime to actually master. If anything, it's made me more interested in exactly the opposite of a microtrend: garments built to be mended and kept, not replaced next season, which is a big part of why this whole site exists in the first place.

It's genuinely too early to know which of this decade's threads will read as defining in another ten years and which will read as a blip - unlike every other entry in this section, this one will need revisiting.