The Rope Chain, the Bandana, the Sunglasses

An XXL basketball jersey and a t-shirt small enough to come from a women's department were both on sale in 2004. You could tell which a man had chosen from the ground up. Timberlands and Air Force 1s sat beneath the wide legs, Converse and Vans beneath the narrow.

Then the small stuff. A man's loose money went there. A rope chain over the jersey, heavy enough to sit on top of the mesh. A bandana knotted under the fitted cap, or else a studded belt and a fringe over one eye. Sunglasses: thin and rectangular in 2000, a Wayfarer by 2009.

Logos were large, and you were meant to read them from across a room. FUBU, Rocawear, Sean John, Ecko: the name sat across the chest, in a size you could not miss. Velour tracksuits did colours cotton cannot, and the cloth had a shine to match.

American Apparel sold the same shapes with no logo anywhere. Supreme, Stüssy and BAPE crossed over from the skate shelves. Sneakers started going into boxes unworn. The resale market grew out of that.

The Forty-Inch White Tee

You started with a plain white tee, long in the body. The trade called these forty-inch shirts, in the Baltimore City Paper's account of the business, against the thirty-three inches Hanes and Fruit of the Loom were then cutting for undershirts.

The same story has a wholesaler pushing production out to 8XL to keep up with orders, while Yao Ming at seven feet six and Sun Ming Ming at seven feet eight and three quarters both wore 6XL. Men of ordinary height were buying two sizes past both of them.

A basketball or baseball jersey layered on top. In the years when Jay-Z, Dipset and Fabolous wore them as a uniform, the jersey coordinated with the right hat and a matching pair of sneakers, and it fitted about four sizes too large. That is Complex's account. Oversized, over white tees, with matching fitted hats, and the league it came from made no difference, according to REVOLT.

A throwback jersey was a licensed reproduction of a retired uniform. Lynn Bloom, who joined Mitchell & Ness in 2001, told SLAM the rule was extremely oversized, nothing smaller than an XXL.

These were mesh, cut for athletes. Go up two sizes and the shoulder seam slides down onto your upper arm, the hem lands at your hip. You could see a hand's width of the white shirt below the jersey hem. The cap stayed flat-brimmed. On the feet, something low and white, an Air Force 1 or a Jordan.

Jay-Z stood next to Michael Jackson on the Summer Jam stage in 2001 in a Latrell Sprewell Knicks jersey. The rotation also ran, in Complex's list, to a Julius Erving Sixers jersey with a white t-shirt tied around his head, and a Jets jersey worn with a green fitted cap chosen to match it.

Jay-Z Retired the Jersey in 2003

On "What More Can I Say" in 2003, Jay-Z dismissed jerseys outright, saying he was past thirty and wanted a crisp pair of jeans and button-ups. Nelly, T.I., Fat Joe and Ja Rule followed through 2004 and 2005, and photographs of Omarion, Beanie Sigel and Fabolous from those years show the replacement.

The replacement kept the layer underneath and lost the volume. You put a button-up on over a white t-shirt and left every button undone. The tee showed at the neck and again at the hem. Dark jeans below, clean leg, no whiskering.

His shoe changed that year too. Reebok put out a signature model under his name in 2003, and Complex says where the S. Carter's shape came from. It copied the Gucci Tennis '84, a low-top luxury shoe with a following that had nothing to do with sport.

Kanye Turned Up in a Pink Polo

Jay-Z shut one door in 2003. The College Dropout opened another in February 2004.

Kanye West arrived in a Ralph Lauren polo with the collar popped, a backpack, trousers that fitted, and pastel where his peers had team colours. Billboard puts it plainly: his contemporaries swam in XXXL tees and retro sports jerseys, and West attacked from a different angle in pastel hues.

It read as a liability first. Labels passed on him. The pink polo and the small backpack did not match what a rapper was supposed to look like, and critics filed him under backpack rap.

Then it spread. By 2004 the Roc's own roster had its collars popped and retro runners on its feet, in Boardroom's account, where boots and Air Force 1s had been. Reebok put out S. Carters in pastel patent leather with West's Dropout Bear on the heel, and A Bathing Ape made him a Bapesta.

The polo he chose was the same garment Abercrombie was selling to suburban teenagers, worn with the collar up the same way.

Pharrell Wore All of It at Once

Pharrell Williams belonged to no single camp.

He met Nigo, who ran the Tokyo label A Bathing Ape, through a shared jeweller. He started turning up in BAPE camo, in beanies and trucker caps.

Then he built his own. Over dinner in Tokyo he asked Nigo to advise on a label he had already named Billionaire Boys Club, and by the time the evening reached a nightclub a BAPE graphic designer working under the name SK8THING had drawn the astronaut logo. Pharrell put the clothes into the video for "Frontin'" in 2003. He later admitted to Complex that this was calculated. The requests came in.

Ice Cream followed in 2004 as the skate-facing half of it: candy colours, cones, diamonds, a beagle, and a sneaker.

One wardrobe now held Japanese streetwear, a skate line and a hip-hop audience at once, on a man who was also producing the decade's biggest pop records.

The Cap Matched the Team Colours

The jersey picked the colour.

A throwback reproduced whatever colours a team had worn decades earlier. The wearer inherited orange, powder blue or maroon without choosing it. The cap had to answer that colour. So did the sneakers. Three points on the body, tied together by a colour a team had picked before the wearer was born.

Cam'ron pushed it as far as it goes, by dropping the team altogether. Monica Morrow dressed him for the "Hey Ma" video in August 2002, and Andscape says what he had on: a white short-sleeved velour suit trimmed in pale pink, a pink bandanna, and a white fitted cap with the New York Yankees logo picked out in pink to match the trim.

Then came the photograph outside a Baby Phat show at New York Fashion Week, in 2002 or early 2003 depending on the account, in a pink mink coat with a hat in the same fur and a flip phone dyed to match. New York shops which had only ever stocked men's sportswear began carrying pink afterwards, in Dazed's telling.

The colour was not confined to one camp. Nick Valensi of The Strokes was in baby pink Converse before "Hey Ma" arrived in 2002.

The Popped Collar at Abercrombie

A polo already has a collar. Put a second polo over the first. Now there are two collars at the neck, one sitting inside the other. Both are meant to be seen. Flipped up, the pair of them frames the jaw.

The two colours have to read as a decision. Too close in tone and the thing looks like one Abercrombie polo with a contrast collar.

The rest followed from there. Cargo shorts on a striped canvas belt. A puka shell or a string of wooden beads at the throat. Leather flip-flops in any weather. Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister stocked every piece, and Stitch Fix lays out the full set.

A recent account of the trend's return is blunt about how it read at the time. Unnecessary layering was the trademark of the early aughts, and the men's version ran to pastel.

Cargo Trousers and a Skate Shoe

Denim gave way to baggy cargo trousers or wide skate chinos. Roomy enough to clear a board, hemmed long enough to catch under the heel. The top was a branded skate tee, from Etnies or Emerica or Supreme, under an unzipped hoodie. Most of the money was in the shoe. DC, Vans or Etnies, thick-soled, in suede or canvas, with a puffy tongue and a padded collar built to survive grip tape. The cap went on backwards, the wallet chained to a belt loop.

The skate outfit sat baggier and rougher than the jersey one. A skate shoe got its damage from use, and holes in the toe counted as a credential.

Tony Hawk's video game arrived in 1999. Suburbs with no skate scene got the whole outfit off it.

Dickies Shorts and Pulled-Up Socks

Fifteen-inch Dickies shorts. A graphic tee. White socks pulled up, skate shoes below. That is the Blink-182 uniform as Highsnobiety writes it, and the band took it onto the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, where WWD says Travis Barker was in Dickies long shorts with Adidas Sambas and Tom DeLonge in a red Hurley t-shirt worn over white long sleeves.

A short-sleeved tee over a long-sleeved one puts a second colour at the cuff for the price of a shirt you already own. WWD says that habit ran alongside cargo shorts and exposed boxers. A trouser worn that low leaves the waistband of those on show.

Creased Khakis and a Pendleton

Oversized khaki Dickies, or a pair of Levi's cut wide to match. A plain white t-shirt. Over it, an open Pendleton button-down in a heavy wool check. The khakis were cinched at the waist to set a crease down the front of each leg. Nike Cortez or Chuck Taylors on the feet, white sports socks pulled up.

The crease was pressed in on purpose.

Chicano style put that outfit into Los Angeles decades before hip-hop borrowed it, and Eazy-E and Snoop Dogg carried the same combination of large pleated khakis and an oversized shirt worn open.

Von Dutch, Ed Hardy, Affliction

Von Dutch was the nickname of a dead Californian pinstriper. The name got bought, and in 2002 the new owners hired a French designer called Christian Audigier, who drew the trucker cap from Marlon Brando's motorcycle cap in The Wild One: mesh at the back, flat foam at the front, curved brim, patch logo.

Then he gave it away. Audigier met Britney Spears in Los Angeles in 2002 and got her into the brand, and when she and Justin Timberlake broke up that year they were both in Von Dutch caps on the cover of People. Ashton Kutcher wore one in most episodes of Punk'd. Paris Hilton remembers walking into the Melrose Avenue store before filming The Simple Life and being told to take whatever she wanted: fifty shopping bags, and that was the show's wardrobe.

A hat off a feed store shelf now cost over a hundred dollars. Von Dutch took $33 million in 2003 and reached $100 million in 2004.

Audigier left in 2004 and licensed the tattoo art of Don Ed Hardy instead. Eagles, skulls and roses ran across the front of men's shirts, foil and crystals set into the print, and the price climbed with the decoration. The Ed Hardy shirt sat over a printed tee and stayed open. By 2009 the label was taking over $700 million a year. Hardy blames the wrong celebrity in one of his shirts for finishing it.

2002

Audigier hired; the trucker cap drawn

2003

Von Dutch takes $33m

2004

Audigier leaves; Ed Hardy licensed. Von Dutch reaches $100m

2005

Affliction starts

2008

UFC bans Affliction gear; Affliction stages “Banned”

2009

Ed Hardy peaks above $700m; Affliction folds its promotion

Affliction took the same graphics to a different room. It started in 2005, printed skulls and wings on oversized black tees, and sold them to the audience watching mixed martial arts. Fighters wore it into the cage. The brand then moved from apparel into promotion: the UFC banned Affliction gear in January 2008 once it learned the company wanted to stage fights of its own.

So Affliction staged them. Its first card, in July 2008, was called Banned. Donald Trump was a major shareholder and Michael Cohen the chief operating officer. The purses were enormous, the buy rates were not, and the third event was cancelled in July 2009. The company went back to sponsoring the UFC.

The shirts outlived all of that, worn mostly by men who had never been in a cage. Somewhere in there the graphic stopped being a status object and turned into a punchline.

A Band Shirt Beneath a Blazer

The Strokes set the guitar camp's uniform in one summer.

The formula was a vintage band t-shirt with a slim blazer or a leather biker jacket over it, black or acid-wash skinny jeans below, and Converse or Dr Martens worn through at the toe.

MR PORTER's account has Julian Casablancas telling the band to dress every day as though they had a gig that evening. They then walked around New York in skinny ties, mismatched Converse and junk-shop sweaters, wearing their stage clothes to buy coffee. Grailed says it was Nick Valensi who gave the instruction, aimed at Casablancas.

The shirt and the jacket both came off a second-hand rail, and the shoes were expected to look finished.

Sizing ran small. Young men went into the women's section of Topshop for skinny jeans and t-shirts too small for them, as FashionBeans has it. The same decade in which a wholesaler pushed production out to 8XL to meet demand also sent men into a women's department for the smallest thing they could get into.

Dockers Took Over the Office

Button-down shirt or polo. Khakis or chinos. A leather shoe. Men who belonged to none of the other formulas wore this to work, and it was quietly layered too: a t-shirt under the open button-down, or a shirt under a sweater with the collar left out.

Whether you tucked sorted the room. A belt showing meant the business side of it.

None of that was accidental. Levi's had acquired Dockers, and in 1992 the company posted an eight-page brochure called A Guide to Casual Businesswear to 25,000 human resource managers, in an account of the campaign reposted from The Atlantic. Khakis moved from weekend wear to office wear on that campaign, and by the 2000s many offices had stretched the Friday rule across all five days.

Beckham and the Groomed Man

A fitted shirt. A flat-front trouser. A clean shoe, no logo anywhere, one layer. There is almost nothing to describe. The clothes were not where the money went. It went on the eyebrows, the skin, the hair and the fingernails.

Mark Simpson had coined the word for this in an essay for the Independent on 15 November 1994, describing a young man with money who lived or worked in the city, near the shops. The idea sat quiet for eight years. Simpson returned to it in Salon in July 2002 and named David Beckham.

The Jeans Sat Low All Decade

Whatever a man had on above the belt, the trousers underneath stayed below his hip bone for all ten years, and only the leg changed. Early on it opened below the knee, wide enough to clear a boot. Levi's still publishes the logic in its fit glossary. A straight leg holds one width from knee to hem. A bootcut narrows at the knee, then widens again at the ankle, to fit over your boots. The 527 Slim Bootcut is the one Levi's still cuts that way. Hardly any of the men buying that shape owned boots. On a body the hem landed on the shoe, folded across the top of the foot with each step, and dragged at the back until the edge went pale and furred.

Levi’s 527 Slim Bootcut, size 32

Front rise

10¾ in

Knee

17 in

Bottom hem

18 in

Label

Sits below your waist

Denim arrived pre-aged. Cotton Incorporated describes the process: an inflatable mannequin, hand sanding at the whiskers, creases, thighs and hip pockets, potassium permanganate brushed on afterwards. Streaks fan sideways from the fly across each thigh. Behind the knee there is a band of crumpled lines, on one back pocket the square outline of a wallet, and across the seat a general lightening.

Dr. Jay's, the Warped Tour, the Award Show

Walk east along 125th Street in Harlem and you would pass Dr. Jay's and Jimmy Jazz, where the long white shirts hung on the rail inside clear plastic so the white stayed white. Do the same on 52nd Street in West Philadelphia and you would find them stacked on folding tables.

For the rest of it you had to travel. The Warped Tour carried pop-punk from car park to car park across the summer. The guitar look stayed inside small venues in London and New York until the records sold enough to move it.

Stay home and television did the work. Bloom's line to SLAM is that in the early 2000s every award show and every video shot looked like a Mitchell & Ness ad.

Hedi Slimane Cut It Narrow

Narrow lapels, a shoulder with no padding in it, a trouser cut close from hip to ankle. That silhouette went out under the name Black Tie for autumn-winter 2000 at Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche Homme, and the record has it there, a season before Slimane moved to Dior. His first Dior Homme collection followed for autumn-winter 2001. That silhouette went on to dominate menswear for more than a decade, by Britannica's reckoning.

The jackets were built on a soft shoulder with no padding to square it off, narrow lapels, and a light construction that hung on the body without holding a shape of its own. Beneath it, one shirt, or one thin sweater, or nothing much. There was no second collar, no hem showing beneath a hem, no colour chain.

Slimane's cut arrived in autumn 2000, the first season of the decade.

What to Check Before You Buy

Start with the jersey.

Mitchell & Ness sized its reproductions from an XXL floor. A current replica bought in your own size lands two short of the decade. Find the shoulder seam. It belongs halfway down the upper arm. A replica that puts it on the shoulder is the wrong garment at any colour.

The tee under it goes by hem length. Hold the hem against your thigh: the forty-inch tee reached mid-thigh. Modern oversized cutting puts its extra volume at the body. A current tee will usually stop higher.

Now the trousers. This is the hard part. Levi's still sells four bootcut fits, the 507, 517, 527 and 537, along with a relaxed flare, and its own product copy has been announcing that bootcut jeans are back. Everything else on a current rail sits at mid rise, with a section of its own for the high rise and almost nothing below the hip bone.

Two measurements settle a pair. Lay the leg flat. Take the width at the knee, then at the bottom hem. A bootcut comes out wider at the hem. On levi.com's own figures the 501, its shrink-to-fit and 1993 versions, and the 511 all narrow from knee to hem. That difference lets you find a bootcut by hand on a crowded rail. Check the front rise while the tape is out. A flared leg on a mid-rise waistband is the wrong trouser altogether.

The thigh comes last, and it shows what the pair cost. Factory sandblasting leaves an even white patch with a visible edge. Work done by hand has no edge at all. The fade runs out into the surrounding indigo. Honeycomb lines belong in the crook of the knee.

A pair from the decade itself arrives with the 10¾-inch rise, the whiskering and the frayed hem already correct, and none of it has to be judged by eye.

How to Wear It Now

Wear one formula the whole way down. A jersey with skinny jeans mixes two of these formulas and reads as neither.

Buy the jersey smaller than they did. A modern replica is cut closer than the reproductions were. One or two sizes up now gets the hang that four used to.

Undo every button on an over-shirt for the 2003 look.

Questions People Ask