‘Wear skinny jeans or die’: inside the Gen Z, Millennials culture war

Never did I think I’d look back at the unflattering fashion choices I made in my 20s in the late nineties and consider myself to have sailed through unscathed. (I once had an accidental mullet and used to wear a handkerchief as a top.)

But taking one look at the latest generation war – Generation Z’ers roasting Millennials, in millions of TikToks, for being old, and uncool – it’s hard as a Generation X’er not to feel grateful that the way I presented myself to the world wasn’t also dragged, mercilessly, on social media in real time.

There are now roughly 8.4 million “Millennial v Gen Z” videos on TikTok, a trend that has been going for a while, but which exploded further last week when one particular and beloved Millennial icon – skinny jeans – came into Gen Z’s cross hairs.

Some of the earlier videos simply point out, like @Lady-Gleep does, that “I don’t think there is a single person who looks better with a side part than they do a middle part”. Others, like newer ones by @julia3lle, and @amelie_coleman_, say they’d rather, respectively, “be homeless” and “die in 30 seconds” than wear a pair of skinny jeans, because they’re so unflattering.

The responses, from Millennials – who’ve also been taken to task on TikTok for loving the laughing-crying emoji, Harry Potter, and taking a selfie from above while smiling – have ranged from the hilarious to the hurt.

Credit: Twitter

“It’s all fun and games until you get a FUPA,” said Canadian mother Catherine Belknap, in a viral TikTok addressed to “the people who came out of our vageen” and referring to the acronym for “fat upper pubic area” that is often the result of childbirth and ageing and which, she jokes, gets firmly in the way of the more rigid (and less stretchy) jeans that Gen Z’ers (now aged between six and 24) are championing.

Another woman, Becky Vieira, clapped back on Instagram, writing that having “faced infertility, PPD and suicidal thoughts… It’s cute that you think I have time or f*cks to give about what you think of my hair and jeans.”

That the trend should hit some Millennials hard, says Clare Southerton, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of NSW, and an expert on TikTok, is no surprise.

“We all have to get to this point where we’re suddenly forced to see ourselves as old, like Millennials are feeling so much right now,” says Southerton, pointing out that the oldest Millennials – a generation broadly understood to have been born between 1981 and 1994 – are turning 40 this year.

Millennials fight back on Twitter after being roasted by Generation Z’s for loving skinny jeans, hair side-parts, and more. Credit: Twitter

“It’s a shocking thing, because for so long, we had this idea of Millennials as like the teenagers, and Gen Z is sort of firmly really taken that over,” she says, adding that, at 32, she doesn’t post TikToks herself, “because I’m too chicken that young people will make fun of me”.

Are members of Generation Z simply harsher on their elders than previous youngsters?

Because, after all, younger people have always hit back against the generation above them; the rejection used to just manifest itself differently, says Professor Mary Louise Rasmussen, a sociologist at the Australian National University.

“Pre-social media, if you think about something like the Beatles, they were like deep Boomer, in terms of their ascendancy, and it wasn’t just about their music, it was about their politics, their hair, and that went viral before the web,” she says, referring to the trends the band helped usher in through Beatlemania in the 1960s – like long hair and a rejection of segregation – which teenagers then adopted the world over in reaction to the conservative styles and repressive mores of their parents.

Southerton agrees.

“Every generation has their sense of, ‘The previous generation doesn’t understand me’,” she says. “Young people really often feel a lack of autonomy, and that older people are trying to tell them what to do… and this plays out in young people wanting to do their own thing and set their own rules.”

And, adds Rasmussen, if anything, members of Generation Z are in many ways socially progressive rather than being particularly critical of others. They are also “exposed to diversity in ways that are unprecedented” as revealed in a 2018 study of Gen Z attitudes that she co-created. (It found that 86 per cent of Generation Z’ers polled supported education about LGBTQI people in secondary schools and 82 per cent supported marriage equality.)

This particular gender war has simply exploded in the way that it has, says Southerton, because TikTok “really encourages people to replicate other people’s content... people kind of like the idea of seeing a video and knowing what it’s referring to, that’s the kind of in-jokeiness of it.”

The war has also proliferated because it’s become an opportunity for Millennials to show that they’re in the joke. “If you can see the trend and laugh at it, then you’re a little bit cool, even if you’re old,” she says. “The best response that Millennials can have, and the response that we’re seeing [a lot], is to laugh at it and be like, ‘It’s true, I’m 32, and I’m not going to be ‘down’ with the kids.’”

If that’s too much of a stretch, it might be comforting to know that Gen Z’ers will one day likely face what many Millennials are now confronting: that they now love the trends they once abhorred.

“Everything I [once] thought of as uncool, now I always do: cooking, gardening, growing your own vegetables,” says Kyra Maya Phillips, an author and 34-year-old teacher in training, adding that, in her early 20s, those activities smacked of “caring for yourself in any way”, which she viewed as the preserve of older people.

She laughs now, while recounting that the other day, “One-hundred per cent, I sent a text to a friend, I said, ‘Look at this majestic sweet potato.’”

Now, she swears by a bit of wisdom she found in Jenny Offill’s hit 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation, which is uttered by the main character, a writer and mother whose marriage is breaking: “But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.”

I’m with her.

It took me nearly four decades to no longer worry about what other people think of what I wear or like, but that’s only because those worries have been supplanted by others, like how much time I’ve got left on this big blue marble, whether I’m kind enough to my children, and if I’ll have to pee behind a tree, should my pelvic floor – a former bounce house for foetuses – give out and I fail to make it to the bathroom in time.

But getting older has its gifts, too. Among them: the delicious understanding that I’ve got a lot to learn from people who are both younger and older than me, even as I’ve sometimes, unfairly, shaken my fists at both groups.

When I was, for instance, tussling, late last year with one of the struggles of getting older – about how to achieve my professional goals and still have enough energy to tend to my children’s hearts – the wisdom that soothed my feverish soul came from an unexpected place.

“Aging [sic],” read the quote from David Bowie, on Instagram, a platform I’d once looked down upon, “is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.”

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