FASHION
Do We Really Need To Bring Back Indie Sleaze?
By: Madison Antino , Senior Writer
Did we all just collectively warp into a universe where it’s 2013? Isabel Marant wedge sneakers are all the rage, skin-tight black skinny jeans are apparently a fall trend, the fashion girlies are dragging their Balenciaga city bags against concrete, and the impressionable teens of TikTok are idolizing Snejana Onopka and the so-called “Slavic Dolls” of the modeling world - The answer is unfortunately no, while the wannabe Tumblr girl deep inside me is desperately wishing it was. With the trend cycle speeding up and younger generations repeating the pattern of nostalgia for an era they never experienced, it’s not surprising that trends from just a decade ago are reappearing. But like most trend revivals, it’s not completely authentic and is ushering in the toxic Tumblr beauty standards we thought were wiped away.
As each season comes and goes, so do a million microtrends inspired by the most niche moments TikTok can come up with. The latest? Indie Sleaze: the dirty, messy, retro inspired party-girl aesthetic of the late 2000s that brought American Apparel and Jeffrey Campbell Litas to the mainstream. The carefree it-girls of the time like Alexa Chung and Sky Ferreira were constantly photographed by the infamous Cobrasnake in the grungiest party scenes imaginable. Makeup was smeared, everyone was clearly on drugs, sweaty and wearing neon shutter shades - a time before they had to worry about posing for glamorous shots to be posted on Instagram. Vogue fashion writer Christian Allaire states, “There was a sloppiness to the look that I found charming. It’s hard to imagine how this will look today, when a curated image is everything.”
The resurgence has been talked about for the past few years, but hasn’t seen this strong of an obsession since this summer, and we can thank Charli XCX’s album “brat” for indie sleaze returning in full force, as tracks like “365” throw listeners into her edgy, sleep-all-day and party-all-night world. Vogue writer Hannah Jackson remarked that Charli is “(one of) a handful of people who have that carnal kind of messiness, that DGAF attitude.” While plenty of her fans idolize her carefree, party girl life, many have pointed out that the album is flaunting many of the toxic ideologies that followed indie sleaze at its peak. One creator on TikTok called the resurgence, “a regression, not a revival.” Another video stated that doing drugs was “not Brat”, in an effort to promote safe partying, while the comments were filled with young adults and even teenagers claiming that Charli would not agree. She probably doesn’t - the lyrics of “365” repeat “should we do a little key? Should we have a little line?” But there’s a line between writing club tracks and actively glamorizing drug use towards a young adult audience when deaths from overdose have continued to rise - from 2019 to 2020, a 94% spike in overdose mortalities was reported, just in the adolescent age group.
It almost feels like with Brat’s popularity that TikTok is turning into Tumblr at its worst. Along with glamorizing drugs, it’s evident that toxic body ideals are still here, even in the wake of the body positivity movement. The years of indie sleaze may have been chic, but it was also when thigh gaps were the standard and Kate Moss’ infamous quote, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” was plastered onto almost every Tumblr blog. Now, Charli XCX sings about anorexia in “Mean Girls”and influencers like Liv Schmidt get famous for bragging about what she eats to stay skinny. Since the pandemic, hospitalizations for eating disorders spiked, with experts saying they’ve gotten even more severe and complicated, and they will only get worse as social media continues to perpetrate toxic body standards as fashion trends. It’s as if we go through a constant cycle of fashion microtrends with a dash of ED culture hidden in the cracks - legging legs, bikini bodies, pilates arms. As authentic as we want the indie sleaze revival to look, we can bring back skin-tight black skinny jeans without flaunting how our thighs don’t touch.