Unlike some millennials, I’ve been pretty on board with the Noughties revival so far. Cargos are extremely comfortable. Bartering with Vinted sellers for Kookai bags I already owned once in 2003 is degrading but also a laugh. The return of low-rise jeans is actually fine this time around, now I no longer choose to wear them with a visible “99% angel, 1% devil” thong. Even over the summer, when the ultra-hip zoomers who buy vapes at the corner shop near my flat started wearing the objectively bad boho disc belts of yesteryear, I thought to myself, “Let them have their Sienna Miller moment, there’s no point starting a generational culture war, is there?”
My stance on that changes today.
I’m sorry to say, haggard comrades aged 27 to 42, that the eye of nostalgia has turned once more, and this time its gaze has fallen upon an era that puts the “why-God-why?” in Y2K: the Daisy by Marc Jacobs-scented, Soulja Boy-soundtracked, PTSD-inducing student style of 2006 to 2008.
Livestrong bracelets, “carpe diem” tattoos, bad fake tans, sequined leggings as trousers, really wide belts over really short skirts, rugby tops worn unironically, the colour “lemon”: this is a mere taste of the collegiate looks that appear in Saltburn, a film that should come with a trigger warning for millennials. Not because of how violent and horny Emerald Fennell’s take on Brideshead Revisited is (it’s so, so horny, in case you were wondering), but because it holds a slightly-too-flattering mirror up to the way students and teenagers dressed in the mid-to-late Noughties, one that makes you think: “Tell you what I fancy buying? Some Johnson’s Holiday Skin and a very cheap set of hair extensions.”
Jacob Elordi, who plays the outrageously posh and popular Oxford University student at the film’s centre, is essentially an advert for dusting off a polo shirt and sporting it with an eyebrow piercing and distressed Topman Motos. Alison Oliver, who appears as his sister, is constantly decked out in sequins, leggings, fake fur and leather jackets, like she just rolled out of Madame Jojo’s. And the movie’s not the only cultural phenomenon taking us on a Dream Matte Mousse-smeared walk down memory lane this winter. Dropping the very same week is the final season of The Crown, whose second instalment tells Prince William and Kate Middleton’s love story as they meet at St Andrew’s College in 2001 and head out into the public eye. In case you haven’t scrolled through as many online galleries of their “romance in pictures” as I have, let me spell out what that means: ankle booties, shrunken cord blazers, Ralph Lauren V-necks, popped collars, and – I can’t even bring myself to say it – chandelier earrings, a jewellery choice that makes every wearer look like a particularly jazzy thrifted lampshade.