What's left of Y2K The revenge of 90s minimalism

When Miuccia Prada unveiled Miu Miu's SS22 collection in late 2021, the fashion world decided to give a second life to the millenium bug that went down in history as Y2K. A phenomenon that started from the bottom of our thumbs ready to edit those inches of skin covered by a thin layer of low rise denim, the hashtag #Y2K has garnered an impressive 9.9 billion views on TikTok. We did not have to wait long to see Y2K establish itself as a macro trend for much of 2021 and 2022, setting up the media asset of digital (and non-digital) publishing and determining the priming of news and feeds.

Although denim is the most fertile ground for the whole wave that explores the contradictions of the 2000s, at Dolce & Gabbana it has become the pretext for reinterpreting the brand's codes - among the first to have given authority to the ripped by crossing the boundaries between elitist fashion and pop culture - in a sort of functional minimalism that has been the protagonist of the SS23 menswear collection. Minimalism found its key in a sort of collection exhibition (the SS23 womenswear) somewhere between the abstract and the erotic curated by none other than Kim Kardashian in which corsets, bustier dresses, and crop tops were the layered elements with which Stefano and Dolce dug inside their archives. Having thus ascertained the fragmentation of aesthetics after the first wave of Y2K discernible in the myriad of trend core experienceable on TikTok and the re-proposition of rather dramatic silhouettes declined according to a more or less glamorous interpretation, it is at least intuitable to reconstruct a scenario in which 90s minimalism will act as an evolutionary framework of that sexy that has so animated the past seasons. Then again, «this is not the time for meaningless fashion», Miuccia Prada said so.