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Are ankle socks the new skinny jeans? According to Gen Z, yes.Credit: iStock
It’s a hard lesson for any generation, I imagine, but for Millennials it’s particularly brutal considering for so long we were defined by our youth.
There was a time you couldn’t go a week without a headline declaring how upstart Millennials were ruining something Boomers held dear. In fact, it was only recently the word “Millennial” stopped being synonymous with youth.
Perhaps the transition was tricky for other generations, but there is a special form of anguish in our brutally swift shift from “young” to “old” playing out on social media – the garbage kingdom we built – surrounded by the very people who are not only replacing us, but who never hesitate to mercilessly remind us of that fact.
As someone who has always loved a bright, patterned, colourful sock, you’d think I’d welcome this new sock age with open arms and covered ankles – and once I got over the initial shock, I sort of did.
When I stepped out of the house recently with my mum leggings dutifully tucked into my candy pink crew socks (how I’d always worn them at home, but never in public) it felt somewhat freeing. A thrill ran through me at the idea that if a Gen Z spared me a glance, they’d clearly see I was not some out-of-touch Millennial.
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Unless, of course, they’d also been following the online sock discourse, and would know that I had only updated my sock habits out of sheer desperation to be seen as cool by them. And, as any self-respecting 2000s survivor knows, desperation and coolness cannot co-exist – the former automatically cancels out the latter.
And that’s perhaps what burns the most: if Millennials and older generations were really cool, we wouldn’t care. We’d walk around with our ankles out and proud, calm in the knowledge that the opinions of others don’t matter, let alone those from a generation who brought back low-rise pants and dresses over jeans.
And so my head tells me to let go – to embrace my age, my own tastes, and what looks best on my body, no matter what the current fashion trend is.
Which is exactly why I sit here, in my cropped pants, wearing mid-calf pastel rainbow ombre socks for the whole world to see. Ahem.
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