A Feb. 16 Vox article gave voice to TikTok’s recent trend criticizing the millennial vices: earnest fondness of ‘cringe’ subjects such as ‘doggo’ or the crying emoji, being “weirdly obsessed” with franchises like Disney and Harry Potter and apparently most of all “they wear side parts and skinny jeans.”
How did this stereotype come to be, and should this lifestyle be a bygone trend?
The movement grew hot around the time that writer Sejla Rizvic published an article on The Walrus titled “Everybody Hates Millennials: Gen Z and the TikTok Generation Wars” on Feb. 9.
In the article, Rizvic described her experience as an older millennial navigating the relatively young app as “refreshingly honest and hilarious,” saying TikTok “embraced idiosyncrasy and irreverence over conformity and overwrought styling.”
It is no secret that millennials are the rather tenuous bridge between the older generations, who are relatively unused to technology, and the Zoomers, a generation practically raised by technology.
The world’s ‘middle child’ age group was young enough to intuit computer interfacing almost as a second language. But they are also old enough to remember the rules that were needed for an analog society, like writing in cursive, solving mathematical equations without a calculator or reading an analog clock,
Both the older and younger generations have gone on as normal, almost heedless to each other’s nearly wholly separate cultures and societies. However, the Western culture of the millennial generation’s adolescence has become all but frozen in time — a testament to the speed Zoomer culture is developing.
Even though every generation fondly clutches the society of their childhood, only a few come from the short period of time that saw Disney Channel Original Movies and Hannah Montana, Mr. Rogers and PBS Kids, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson — their individual rises and falls.
So, just as older generations have bittersweet memories of mullets and bell-bottom jeans, the millennials and some zillennials can fondly remember unironically middle parting their hair or squeezing themselves into the least possible amount of denim and adopting ‘the skinny jeans stance.’
It’s hard to justify such harsh criticism over something as inconsequential as a fashion trend, though. After all, the generation of Zoomers behind this TikTok fad is the same group that had to be forcibly prevented from eating laundry detergent pods, and that has also become mystifyingly conservative, despite being at the front lines of gun violence at schools, climate change and government failures.
For those who enjoy 2000s fashion, this isn’t all fun and games, though. While middle parts might not have adverse health effects, wearing skinny jeans can. According to a TENA Men survey, 10% of skinny jean wearers experienced unpleasant effects, including urinary tract infection (UTI), groin damage and bladder weakness.
In the end, though, the health risk of tight jeans is not particularly major. If you compare the dangers of too-small jeans to the health risks from almost completely outdated practices like corsetry, footbinding or crinoline-framed dresses, denim seems like a pretty safe way to go after all.
Photo by Jamia Johnson
