Goodbye prairie hello "Nanny"

a fashion prediction

You heard it here first: the new trend will be 1990s bat mitzvah dresses. Early-mid 1990s. Polyester. Fit-and-flare. Shiny on top, poufy on the bottom.

How do I know this? I have a gift. I can simply tell that this is what’s next up. I’m not telling you what to do with this information. Nor do I know what to do with it. Do I like buy stock in this thought? Because I don’t at all want one of these dresses… now. But maybe I will be a fashion victim when the time comes.

Here’s how I know:

The next thing in fashion is always always always the thing that looks most off at the moment. So if we’re in a moment with lots of trad-sisterwife dresses, natural fibers, caftans, yaaas it has pockets, t-shirt dresses, and so forth, oh right and also apparently athleisure dresses, the thing that these are most definitively not are those stiff, fussy dresses worn by, among others, 12-year-old Jewish girls at coming-of-age cermonies circa 1993.

These dresses, they’re awful! Right? This is why they’re what’s up next. They’re what vintage shops won’t be able to stock quickly enough. It’ll be its own section in H&M.

So it’s that these dresses look wrong now that tells me they’re up next, but also the whole post-pandemic return to in-person socializing slash nostalgia for no not just pre-pandemic but pre-9/11.

When this becomes a whole thing within the next couple years, I merely ask for credit where credit is due, and maybe a taffeta number in a not-too-peachy pink.