Today’s youth are harking back to the messy hipster aesthetic of the late 2000s and early 2010s – and at the heart of that was French designer and queen of cool, Isabel Marant.
A long time ago (2011) in a galaxy far away (Paris), Kate Moss posed in an advertising campaign wearing Isabel Marant’s latest creation: a suede lace-up high-top sneaker with a wedge heel and a logo on the side. The shoes were called “The Bekett” – named after a friend of Marant’s – and after Moss’s stamp of approval, they were everywhere: Beyoncé wore them in her Love on Top music video; Eva Mendes laced them up to run from paparazzi in Hollywood.
Fourteen years later, Marant’s sneaker wedge is back. The new campaign for the trainers – made in collaboration with Converse – stars Gen Z favourite Lila Moss, the daughter of Kate and creative director Jefferson Hack. In the ads, she walks down a cobblestone city street with loose, long hair and shredded denim, just like her mother did more than a decade ago. “People kept asking over and over for us to bring the shoes back,” Marant tells the BBC from her Paris studio. “And why not? When something is well-achieved and good, it remains good forever. Kate, she is also forever.”
Lila is representing the next generation, and her version of coolness is a new take on indie sleaze, a term for the messy hipster style of the late 2000s and early 2010s, originally identified in an Instagram account of the same name that “document[s] the decadence of mid-late aughts and the indie sleaze party scene that died in 2012”, according to its bio. The account features grainy images of clubbers and party goers in hole-filled T-shirts, ripped tights or skinny jeans, with messy hair and make-up, having a lot of fun. Embodied originally by UK TV series Skins, and celebrities like UK model Alexa Chung and US singer Sky Ferreira, it was a grimmer, grimier version of the sunny bohemian look embodied by Sienna Miller and Stella McCartney. Since 2022, indie sleaze has been finding a new generation of fans.
The original indie sleaze movement swapped lace-eyelet tops for faded T-shirts, and traded bootcut jeans, and heels for motorcycle boots and super-skinny jeans from Australian label Ksubi or Swedish brand Cheap Monday that had ankles so narrow, wearers often had to cut them with kitchen scissors before pulling them on for the night. Emerging party photographers like Mark Hunter (also known as “The Cobrasnake”) documented the scene on still-novel digital cameras, and independent magazines like Supersuper, Vice and Paper covered the movement, which borrowed heavily from Gen X’s arch embrace of irony and cultural gatekeeping.
An online debate that frequently surfaced on the social media platform MySpace asked whether the late Amy Winehouse really used ash from a burned cork as eyeliner, or whether she just spread a rumour to mess with wannabe pop stars. A popular joke from the time: “How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Oh, it’s like a really obscure number. You’ve probably never heard of it.”
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