12 Brands from the ‘90s and Early Aughts I Hope Zoomers Never Bring Back

No Fear might be the most quintessentially ‘90s/early aughts aesthetic I can think of. Just look at the elements in this one T-shirt: Fake spray paint/splatter graphics. A needlessly angular typeface. A skull that looks as though it was pulled straight from a Walmart skateboard deck. 

Unfortunately, though, given that this very shirt popped up on the current Zumiez website, I‘m afraid it may already be rearing its head once more.

If these pants were to exist in a total vacuum, you can see the idea behind them. If temperatures change, you can convert your pants into shorts, and for an extra mortifying move, you can store those same severed pant tubes in the cargo pockets. Of course, fashion is the opposite of a vacuum and exists to be observed, which will not go well for the wearer. 

For the younger folks, I hope they never know the feeling of a sharp zipper cutting into their kneecap when they have to kneel down in these pants.

I could see these making a comeback in the name of irony, but to be honest, ironic T-shirts feel like they’re a millennial artifact. So instead, you’ve just got a dick joke so blunt it couldn’t pierce tinfoil, and a really unpleasant amount of cartoon breasts on your back.

Thankfully, zoomers seem to have stuck with the much preferable pomades and creams when they’re looking to affix their hair a certain way. They’ll never know the porcupine-ish, weirdly warm sensation of touching their hand to a series of carefully preened hair points. Nor the rivulets of gummy Got2B runoff streaking down their forehead directly into their cornea.

In theory, these shirts were supposed to be laid-back and beachy. In practice, they all just look like beginner Photoshop tutorials. It’s like the T-shirt equivalent of a Geocities page with a harsh gradient background.

Are these cultural appropriation in some weird way? I hope they never rear their clackety little heads far enough to inspire that debate. Either way, they were once the chosen neck accessory of thoroughly landlocked teens. Thankfully, that era has passed.

These were pretty egregious even back in the 1990s and early aughts. In the much saner fashion world of today, they look patently insane. I’m not sure the vibe cartoonishly large stitching was ever going for, but it just ends up looking like your pants came in the package with an action figure. These were the subtle ones, too, because in case one neon-bordered back pocket wasn’t loud enough, you’d have the option to have an entire needlepoint throw pillow design crammed onto the other.

Specifically, the ones that felt the need to introduce metallic inks and Swarovski crystals into the mix. It’s kind of wild because while actual traditional American tattoos are in the midst of an undeniable moment, these shirts still look outlandishly ugly. If classic tattoo flash is the regular Ralph Lauren polo, these are the ones where the pony stretches across your entire torso.

Speak of the devil. The ‘90s obsession with maximized branding led to Ralph Lauren polos with inflated logos that were sometimes so large that they spread over half of the wearer’s chest like the burn from a house fire. I warn the younger generation to avoid these, unless they want to discover the pain of an embroidered pony grating off your entire left nipple over the course of a day.

This one I’m not too worried about as far as a resurgence goes, because it’s just incredibly mean in hindsight. It was a tween girl’s clothing store that, as the name suggests, carried only the sizes 5, 7 and 9. Zoomers are bringing back a lot of things, but they generally frown upon “internalized body image trauma.”

If you’re unfamiliar with Soap Shoes, you might just think this is a really weird choice of pose. It is, in fact, showing off their unique feature: grind plates installed into the midfoot of the shoe. Sick shoe tricks aside, they were horrifically ugly. Couple that with the fact that the grind plates’ main function in practice was to make you eat shit while climbing stairs, and they weren’t something that was really boosting your social stock.

Who among us didn’t leave a permanent divot in our shins trying to learn how to tail whip one of these bad boys? They advertised all sorts of advantages, none of which really existed. They were an easy way to get around, as long as there weren’t any small pebbles between you and your destination. They folded up for portability, as long as you consider a heavy and sharp mass of metal “portable.” To say nothing of how easily they collided with the elderly, leaving a sea of shattered hips in their wake.