The Y2K Craze Comes for Interiors

Welcome to The Trend Times, a column that explores design fads in the age of doomscrolling.

You can’t go anywhere online without bumping into Y2K nostalgia. For the past couple of years, my TikTok algorithm has been littered with Gen Z kids who are obsessed with the aesthetics of my childhood. At this point, I’m jaded by the early aughts revival in fashion, with the comeback of micro-skirts, skinny eyebrows and iPod shuffles fashioned into hair clips. For some of us, Uggs never left!

But the trend creeping into interior design cuts straight to the heart, turning my attempts at dissociative scrolling into nostalgic, visceral deep dives into the past. Capitalizing on renewed interest in the time period, Millennial Posters are now exploring what the era looked like beyond low rise jeans—see this ode to the bedding of my youth, and posts that ask "Which early 2000s bedroom did you have?"

But the most fascinating are the young women so obsessed with this look they’ve created bedrooms that are early aughts "time capsules," even though they were infants (or not even alive) back then. These girlies aren’t casual hobbyists, with the occasional zebra print blanket or Playboy pillow. By minimizing any tells that it’s 2023 and jam-packing their spaces with iconic Y2K brands, color palettes and technology, their rooms look like they were frozen in 2003.

Jayden Naomi, a 20-year-old internet personality from Nashville, first got into the look as the trend started to take off in 2019, but via clothes. She started researching the era, and after finding a Juicy Couture jacket at the thrift store, was hooked. "The looks between 2000 to 2012 were so identifiably ME," she says in an email. "I ALWAYS can tell if something is me or not." Jayden then turned to pop-culture, like the movie The Girl Next Door, for inspiration: "Most peeps around in the 2000s had that one family member with a pink and zebra room. She was the girl I wanted to be!" Further inspiration came from old pictures of Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, Snooki—"basically any unapologetic female maximalist." (A shrine to these icons is collaged on one of her walls.)