In December 2022, Katie Holmes attended the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball in a over jeans. It was a look that immediately recalled the clothing that Disney starlets used to wear at the Teen Choice Awards circa 2005 – all spaghetti-strapped cami dresses, denim , floss-thin scarves scraping the knees and weird newsie caps – which stirred morbid fascinations in those old enough to have lived through the trend first time around. “This is what true y2k is but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation,” read a viral Tweet that has now amassed more than 165,000 likes.
The truth is: this dress-over-jeans outfit was a rare miss from Holmes, a woman whose downtown nonchalance has inspired countless headlines on this website because of the effortlessness with which she throws together everywoman basics. That is partly because the look emerged too early on in the dress-over-pants revival and partly because it was a little too much of a Noughties jump scare. When people layer and skirts over trousers in 2024 – see: Chopova Lowena, Luar and Knwls’s most recent collections – it tends to be a little less casual with a little less .
(Unless perhaps you are PinkPantheress or attend Goldsmiths University.) Consider the look Emily Ratajkowski wore to Adwoa Aboah’s Gurls Talk fundraising gala as a successful evolution of this once-maligned trend. She last night posed for photographs in a long-line halter-neck dress with – both rendered in a silken fabric – with and a chainmail Ra.
