Why Gen Z is so nostalgic about ‘indie sleaze’

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.” 

It’s worth noting that, at the time, indie sleaze wasn’t the moniker used to describe the super-tight leather trousers, studded biker jackets and perspex designer clutches created by designers like Marant, Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, and Hedi Slimane at Dior Homme and Saint Laurent. As NYU professor and cultural critic Ruby Justice Thelot tells the BBC: “Indie sleaze did not exist.” The look was instead called “hipster style” or “Tumblr style,” after the popular blogging platform, or simply “club-kid style”, since clubs were where the neon babydoll dresses and underground band T-shirts were most often photographed.

It wasn’t until a TikTok video by the trend forecaster Mandy Lee popularised the term indie sleaze in 2022 that the phrase really took root – especially among teens and young adults who’d been cooped up in covid lockdowns during their early adolescence, leaving them craving the visceral contact high of a jam-packed dance floor.

“It seems like such a cool time to be alive,” says Chloe Plasse, a 21-year-old design student at the New School in Manhattan. Plasse frequently wears Isabel Marant in hopes of capturing some of the designer’s “glamorous but cool” essence, even if it’s being worn to a university lecture instead of a music festival. In April, Sarah Shapiro, a retail correspondent for the fashion industry newsletter Puck, reported an increase in Isabel Marant’s logo merchandise among wealthier Gen Z shoppers in Paris and London; this month, costume designer Jacqueline Demeterio featured the brand on the wealthy suburban satire Your Friends and Neighbors, putting a prominent Isabel Marant logo shirt on its affluent teen heroine Tori Cooper. 

“Isabel Marant’s 2010 collection is my dream wardrobe,” says New York City college student Nikki Ball Kumar, 19, who adds she even has saved searches on resale platforms like eBay and Vestiaire Collective to find the designer’s greatest hits, which include skinny jeans embroidered with gold beads and pyramid studs, shrunken tweed jackets in bright red and turquoise with unfinished raw hems piped in black leather and, of course, the original Bekett wedge sneaker heels.

The adoration of millennial and Gen X shoppers who were young and party-minded in the indie sleaze years, along with the wistful curiosity of those too young to have ever heard Winehouse sing in person at a sticky-floored pub, has created a sales frenzy for Marant. “I think people are very interested in my designs right now because they hit on two kinds of nostalgia,” Marant says. “You know, on the one hand, you’re nostalgic for a time you lived in. For Millennials, it’s 2005, 2010, 2015. So that is one kind of nostalgia. But really, the stronger form of that feeling is being nostalgic for a time you didn‘t live in.”

Marant says today’s youth see the 2010s as the last gasp of freedom before the era of constant digital surveillance and poreless AI filters. “Today everything is so polished, so fake. That is not rock ‘n’ roll. It doesn’t really appeal to me or my idea of what’s sexy – certainly not what is cool. It gives me hope to see that young people are also getting fed up, and saying, ‘These fillers and this fake French style, like Emily in Paris, is not very cool’.” For younger shoppers who want to walk a mile in the shoes of an indie sleaze princess instead of a perfectly manicured Netflix one, Marant’s wedge heels are a natural fit.

Searches for the shoe are up on resale sites like Vestiaire Collective and The RealReal, though they are available infrequently. Marant admits she didn’t realise what a hit the Bekett sneakers would be, and didn’t produce a lot of them to begin with. “I used to save up forever for one Comme des Garçons jacket or one Margiela top. So I hoped people would do that for my designs, too. We didn’t make a ton of these sneakers. That isn’t my way. I do love the [Converse] ones though – still cool but a bit light, a bit soft. But of course,” she smiles, “you should still wear them with a skinny jean. Or skinny black leather pants, you know? In Paris, all the women who grew up partying with Kate Moss, we have all stopped smoking. But we will never stop that. It is forever the cool French way.”