It was bound to happen eventually... the 90s are back.

Fashion, they say, is cyclical.  Everyone has heard someone say (or has said themselves) that it's no use throwing away clothes because "everything comes back in style."  (Incidentally, this is terrible advice – by the time it comes back in style it probably won't fit you and/or you'll be embarrassed to ever have worn it.  When in doubt, throw it out!  Or better yet, donate it.)  In a world of seemingly finite ideas, fashion is bound to repeat itself.  And since we finally seem to be coming to the end of the dark days of 1980s retro it looks like the 1990s are on their way back.

Elaine Benes, retro style icon.

Remember when we were all wearing floral-print dresses with big clunky shoes?  Guess what?  It's a bona fide trend in New York.  They're calling it a resurgence of Elaine from Seinfeld, but I remember the shapeless floral sack spreading far beyond that show.  I even had a few myself.  And the socks with granny shoes is sort of a natural combination between this summer's awful socks with sandals trend and the less offensive menswear-inspired Oxford shoes that are all over the place.  Toss in a pair of leggings (and lord knows those don't seem to be going away) and you've got yourself a full-on retro chic ensemble.

Remember yesterday
when I said mixed prints
were a trend for fall?
I give you Angela Chase.

One fashion editor is calling this look "Upper West Side Grunge," which is sort of ironic since the original look was a natural offshoot of the original grunge trend.  So much of fashion in the 1990s was about meticulously putting together a look designed to send the message that you didn't care how you looked.  It was sort of an over-correction for the excess of the 1980s.  Everything was baggy and incongruous and mismatched – and if you were really devoted, wrinkled as well.  Oh, and by the way?  Grunge is coming back in it's way too.  Check out how much plaid Old Navy is showing this fall.  Big plaid shirt + distressed jeans or leggings + boots = grunge.  Only this time around it's a little more polished and less... well, grungey.  We don't so much mind people knowing that we care what we look like now. 

Thanks for bringing sexy back, Katie.

Lest you think it's just grunge making a comeback, the other end of the spectrum is seeing a resurgence as well.  1990s prep is back in a big way – let's go back to Old Navy and have a look at their "perfectly preppy" page, where argyle reigns supreme.  The September issue of Glamour even featured a "how-to" guide for accurately dressing the preppy part.  We can thank Katie Holmes for bringing pegged jeans back into style – she started doing it two years ago.  And let's not forget the oversized blazer, worn with everything from leggings to jeans to those shapeless dresses and everything in between. 

Even our retro is retro!  The whole Mad Men craze sweeping the nation?  The one that has women in full skirts and men in tailored suits?  It feels just a little like the 1990s swing revival, where women were wearing full skirts and hot red lips and men were wearing tailored zoot suits and slicked-up hair. 

There's a saying:  if you're old enough to remember the trend the first time, don't wear it the second time.  It's usually good advice since the things we wore at a younger age look inappropriate once we're older.  But in the case of 1990s wear I think it's safe to say I'll be avoiding some of these rerun trends because I'm still cringing at the pictures of myself wearing them the first time.  (If baby tees and baggy jeans come back in style, I don't even want to know about it.)  So no thanks on the pegged jeans and floral sacks – though I may pick up a plaid shirt or two.

Mostly I think we're safe as long as men don't start shaving stripes into their eyebrows again and as long as we women don't start walking around looking like this:

We call those "mom jeans" now. And let's not even discuss that ruffled blouse.