The Y2K Aesthetic is Fully Back, but Can It Stick Around?

The Y2K Aesthetic is Fully Back, but Can It Stick Around?

The current iridescent craze has a mood of expectancy.

When editor and consultant Casey Lewis started her newsletter digest on youth culture, After School, she instinctively gravitated towards pastel and iridescent-like backgrounds for her graphics. “To be honest, and I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, I didn’t think about it too deeply!” she told me over email. “For me, holographics evoke a sort of tech-y nostalgia that takes me back to the early days of my interneting. Because After School is about youth culture, and because so much of youth culture today feels like a throwback to the ’90s and early-aughts, it just felt right.” The era, also known as Y2K, was marked by an aesthetic that’s “not too self-serious, just kind of cool and a little tacky, but in a fun way,” Lewis explained.

The Y2K aesthetic characterized the end of the millennium. “Things like rounded, bloated typefaces, hyper digital elements like metallics, gloss, mirror and 3-D, as well as implied tech elements like loading bars and rendered buttons,” said Jane McFarlane, the brand director of creative agency The Digital Fairy. One of the most recognizable elements, however, is the era’s color palette and finishes: glossy holographic gradients, watery iridescent colors, and shiny silvers. “These design elements were super popular during the late ’90s and early 2000s,” she continued. “They reflected our excitement about rising tech advancements as well as us naively trying to make sense of our world both on and offline.”

If we described Y2K’s look in a word, it would be iridescence. Even though iridescence took over the world of high-end design and art in the mid 2010s, its appeal is now extending to cultural artifacts and consumer goods. At the 2020 VMA awards, Lady Gaga wore a marine-life inspired Iris Van Herpen iridescent number; Lorde has a series of holographic stage costumes. In consumer goods, this motif abounds too: Three recent book releases, including Vagablonde by Anna Dorn, Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner, and Fake Accounts with Lauren Oyler exhibit the illusion of a rainbow-like shimmer. The promotional campaign for the Apple Card uses a similar gradient color palette, and in Disney’s Frozen 2, Elsa’s new getup as the fifth spirit is optic white with diamond-shaped iridescent inserts. Even WGSN’s 2025 Advanced Color Forecast predicts futuristic iridescence in smart glass in office-design environments and structural color, “a technology that involves growing cellulose into nanostructures that reflect light,” with a known iridescent effect.