Y2K has quickly become one of the most adored aesthetics by Generation Z and members of older generations that like to follow the latest trends. However, some might be oblivious to the sinister portrayal of men and women photographed for “outfit inspiration,” that leads directly back to the whitewashing and fat phobia that is the cornerstone of prominent fashion trends.

Y2K, an abbreviation for the year 2000, was not coined by this generation. An older version of Y2K, called “KayBug”, was a fashion trend from 1998 to 2003. Whilst both trends are meant to display the 2000’s iconic fashion moments, KayBug is much more technologically influenced. The aesthetic of Y2K originally referred to the widespread computer programming shortcut that was expected to cause extensive havoc as the year changed from 1999-2000. To briefly explain this phenomenon: a large amount of people thought there would be a computer crash that would cause the world to end. What did the fashionista’s of 1998 decide to do? They decided to turn it into a trend. Y2K (or KayBug) was very different to the Y2K that can be found from a google search or a scroll through Pinterest today. Y2K in 1998 used hardware and tech optimism to create their clothing. Some staples of this trend were tight pants, chunky sneakers, lots of eyeshadow and shiny metals. Whereas Y2K in current times is usually defined by high-waisted wide leg jeans, cropped camis, cropped sweaters, silk fabrics, thick and bold eyeliner, fun earrings, and similar to the original Y2K, chunky sneakers.

Sabrina Strings, the author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, does an amazing job of explaining how the stereotype of Black people, especially Black women being fat or obese, was created by white people. Strings uses the biographies of major influencers like George Cheyne, a man in the medicine field during eighteenth-century, and Elizabeth Bisland, one of the writer and editors of the Cosmopolitian in the nineteenth-century, to follow the progression of “a fetish for svelteness and a phobia about fatness” throughout history and it’s ties to “the rise of the transatlantic slave trade and the spread of Protestantism”. She examines how in the late twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, fatness (with an emphasis on Black women) was seen as a threat to public health. Through these topics, she does deep explanation into how fatness was labeled as immoral and was correlated with blackness, and adds in how “Slenderness, especially among women, was both aesthetically preferable and a sign of national identity.” Strings explains how the standard for a Black women’s body went from well-portioned and plump to greedy and excessive compared to white women. Strings acknowledges that public figures like Thomas Jefferson, John Kellogg and Ralph Waldo Emerson were “integral to the creation of the slender aesthetic among fashionable white Americans.”

With Y2K specifically, KayBug was created during the rise of the eating disorder Anorexia Nervosa. There was twenty four percent increase in diagnoses in the years 1999 and 2000 (the years in which Y2K was started) according to an article published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This translates into the modern Y2K aesthetic because it was based on a trend that was started during the rise of an eating disorder that feeds off Eurocentric beauty standards. The majority of the public has been taught that skinny white people are prettier than fat people and Black people. Therefore when people begin to scroll through their feeds, they are more drawn to skinny white girls for their inspiration or to be the main image of aesthetics rather than fat or Black people. This further pushes skinny white people to do better in algorithms, and apps will continue to provide skinny and white content to the forefront of an aesthetic in order to synthesize a more idealized version. It’s effect is certain exclusivity or “gate-keeping” of aesthetics for particular body types and skin colours. In the year 2000, there was a rise of In conclusion, aesthetics are currently creating larger gaps between skinny and fat people along with white and Black people.

Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK65135/
https://books.google.com/books/about/Fearing_the_Black_Body.html?id=Y1ZxDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button
https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2019/08/23/morality-aesthetics-and-fatness-review-of-sabrina-strings-fearing-the-black-body/
https://youtu.be/zU7bXgSvJpE