Noughties fashion disaster that should stay in the past

Trends come in cycles but did the shorts and tights combo have to be exhumed? Katie Rosseinsky dons her deniers’ to look at the fauxstalgia’ culprits who are driving a comeback

- Katie Rosseinsky

Ugg boots. Low-rise jeans. Ballet pumps. I’ve looked on with varying levels of concern as the trends of my adolescence have been exhumed and reimagined for a younger generation. And every time another Noughties look has been reclaimed as desirable Y2K nostalgia, a voice in my head has whispered: “Please, whatever comes next, don’t let it be shorts and tights.”

For a stretch of the late Noughties, a period that roughly coincided with the premiership of Gordon Brown, layering miniature shorts over a pair of bog-standard black opaques was somehow deemed the height of cool (if you were young, female, fashion-obsessed and spent all your surplus income in Topshop). Alexa Chung wore shorts and tights with collared blouses that looked vaguely Parisian. Sienna Miller teamed them with floaty boho tops. The Gossip Girl girls modelled the look while strolling around New York’s Upper East Side, swapping plain black for colourful hosiery.

No one seemed to question the fact that the friction of polyester under denim (or worse, under another man-made fibre) wasn’t exactly the most comfortable sensation. Or mention the high risk of resembling a pantomime extra rather than a French person. Eventually, though, we collectively saw sense, and the trend became pretty much extinct as a new decade rolled around, aside from the odd reappearance on the Chanel catwalks, infrequent enough to shrug off. It seemed, like so many of the period’s sartorial horrors, to have been safely consigned to grainy digital photos in old Facebook albums.

But the trend cycle is inexorable. It has a habit of dredging up the ugliest fashion crimes from a couple of decades ago and presenting them as somehow fun and retro. So, inevitably, my prayers have failed, and the shorts-tights combo is now creeping its way back into the mainstream, one slippery, slightly laddered foot at a time.