Overalls, chokers and high waisted jeans are just some of the trends walking through the halls of Northwood. For students the trends are new and exciting, but for teachers, the returning trends are a flashback to the past.
Dance teacher Kristen Oakes graduated from Northwood in 2006. In contrast to older generations, Oakes thinks that more recent generations strive for something different.
“It’s kind of crazy that now everyone is striving to look like a time period, but in that time period they were always trying to look like something new or different,” Oakes said.
Students and teachers offered a variety of reasons of why fashion trends have returned. English teacher Jill Jackl finds it humorous that generations think the current trend is original.
“Fashion is just like history: you wait long enough and it’s just going to return,” Jackl said. “I am humored that every generation thinks that the trend is uniquely theirs, and perhaps to a degree it is adopted with some differences and some nuances, but by and large it is the same thing, and some should be left in the past that have returned.”
Junior Caroline Lougee thinks that old trends have returned because this generation finds it trendy to wear what their parents wore.
“Some people [follow their parents’ trends] if they are following [current] trends, because a lot of the older trends of their parents are coming back, and also people are starting to shop at thrift shops more because it’s kind of cool to find clothes that other people don’t have,” Lougee said.
Despite where trends come from, both students and teachers agree that fashion is like a big recycling bin. Senior Kendra Moon thinks that we reuse styles and give them little tweaks to modernize them.
“We just reuse a lot of trends over and over and over again, because, I mean, what else are we supposed to do, and we just change them a little bit so that they are modern,” Moon said.
Jackl has noticed some trends that have returned, but the purpose for wearing them have changed.
“Short hair [has come back]. There was an ice skater who won the Olympics in 1976, her name was Dorothy Hamill, and she had this short haircut that was really new vogue and very avant garde,” Jackl said. “I think the young woman nowadays are wearing [short hair] more for a sense of androgyny rather than the avant garde, but I do think there’s still some forward thinking.”
Despite all the reused trends, Oakes feels that this generation has still made progress in fashion.
“Most of the fashion that we see now is some version of something that has happened in the past, even though there’s lots of new and creative things and we’ve made many advances like if you look back to the early 1900’s to now, clearly we have moved forward with fashion trends,” Oakes said.
Even with the past trends coming back, students think that there are still attributes of our generation’s style that are unique.
Senior Sarah Salzmann thinks that our generation has become more relaxed with their style.
“[In history] people would dress really fancy in big ball-gown dresses, and they would get big hairdos just to go to the grocery store, but now people walk out in sweatpants and a T-shirt to go to the grocery store,” Salzmann said.
Junior Melinda Frazier thinks that the more relaxed style is what defines her generation, and some of the trends her generation has would be unacceptable to past generations.
“Our generation is really relaxed with their style, and everything that [our generation] wears [doesn’t have] very many limitations anymore,” Frazier said. “I think that we have new trends that are our own, because not all parents and people of different generations would accept what we wear.”
However, Salzmann thinks this generation’s relaxed style still has a certain cleanness to it.
“[Our style is] a clean casual; people want to present themselves nicely, but they also want to be comfortable,” Salzmann said.
– By Whitney Bennett
