Texto original en inglés: A 2000s Fashion History Lesson

A 2000s Fashion History Lesson: Logos, Low-Rise, and It Bags

If one moment sums up early-2000s fashion, it was February 2000: Jennifer Lopez wore a chiffon Versace dress to the 42nd Grammy Awards, and the world was never the same. With a neckline that plunged all the way below her belly button, the world was in a tizzy—but how did it stay on? And what did it look like from the side? Everyone wanted to see the dress! So much so that it inspired the idea of Google Image Search. And so began a decade of digital fashion consumption.

Dubbed the aughts and the naughts (the former used in the US, the latter in the UK), the decade was ruled by celebrity: a proliferation of reality TV, blogs filled with paparazzi shots, and 2006’s Twitter, which gave fans a front-row seat into the lives and musings of their favorite celebrities—often without a publicist’s intervention.

Regarding mainstream fashion, it was a decade of taste so bad it was almost good—almost. Think Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears in matching denim getups, Juicy Couture sweatsuits galore, Von Dutch trucker hats, and Ed Hardy tattoo tees.

On the runways, logomania ruled, and designers sexed it up with Tom Ford, Donatella Versace, Roberto Cavalli, and Hervé Léger infusing heady doses of sultry into their collections. A whirlwind look back at the in-your-face trends of early-2000s fashion, below.

Women’s Trends of the 2000s

Introducing the It Bag: The Purse Becomes Icon

If eyes are the window to the soul, by the time the 2000s rolled around so too were handbags. Thanks in part to a certain Ms. Carrie Bradshaw, bags became the focal point of an outfit. After the launch of Fendi’s Baguette in 1997 (as fashion lore goes, the bag, designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi, was initially unpopular among the Fendi design team, who feared it had too much personality during a minimalist-fashion era), it skyrocketed to handbag stardom and is often considered fashion’s first It bag. Bradshaw, of course, famously carried multiple iterations of the Baguette throughout Sex and the City’s fabulous six-season run.

In the 2000s each brand had a white-hot bag (or two) that fashion folk clamored to carry. As mentioned, Fendi had its carb-inspired Baguette; Balenciaga had its slouchy Motorcycle City Bag, introduced in 2001 by then creative director Nicolas Ghesquière; Chloé had its boho Paddington bag, created by then creative director Phoebe Philo in 2005; Galliano debuted the Saddle bag at Dior’s spring-summer 2000 show. And over at Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs was cranking out It bag after It bag with clever collaborations. Artists were invited to make interventions with Vuitton’s storied monogram: In 2001, it was Stephen Sprouse’s graffiti collection; in 2003, it was Takashi Murakami’s smiley flower-and-cherry collections. These bags were not to go unnoticed: statement making, eye-catching, and the center of attention!

In 2002, Sarah Mower charted the rise of the It bag in Vogue’s October issue: “In about 1993, fashionettes everywhere wanted the identical item at the same time (a Kate Spade shopper, a sporty Prada knapsack). Then came the great Baguette hunt for exotic hide and fabric varieties (a standard shape, but now in individualistic surface patterns). Before long, thanks to Gucci, Prada, Fendi, Dior, we were buying entire bag wardrobes, toting them as up-to- the-split-second status trophies.”

Logomania: Here Come the Logos!

“Fashion is pushing its love affair with logos to the limit. If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” wrote Vogue in its March 2000 issue.

All the aforementioned It bags were typically brandished with a logo—but that didn’t stop there! Dior’s bikinis featured their Oblique monogram; Burberry checked just about every object that could be checked; Gucci’s double Gs festooned belt buckles; and Marc Jacobs even painted his naked body with the neon pink Louis Vuitton logos inspired by LV’s collab with Stephen Sprouse in 2008 for an ad campaign. If early-2000s fashion had a square inch to spare, it was filled with an alphabet city of letters.

Tongue-in-cheek nods to this super-trend were made; in the brilliant March 2000 editorial “Branded” for Vogue, Helmut Newton took model Angela Lindvall and decorated her string-bikini-clad body with a smattering of logos belonging to all the mega fashion houses—a mishmash of monograms and icons where Chanel’s double Cs intermingled with Fendi’s double Fs to create a nonsense of logos. And Dapper Dan, all the way back in the late 1980s, was cutting up Gucci garment bags and transforming them into jackets in a brilliant reclamation of luxury.

All this emphasis on the bag you carried spawned a growing market of counterfeit bags—and with it a new industry of authenticators. In May 2001 Vogue reported on the issue: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, not the chicest. When you’ve dished out big bucks for the latest leather logo bag but suspect it’s a fake, who ya gonna call? David Colman meets fashion’s new crime fighters: the Authenticators.”