If you grew up in the mid-2000s, you didn’t just watch the Disney Channel, you were immersed in it. The shows often served as a springboard for the stars (such as Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus and Raven-Symoné) to become household – or, more accurately, playground – names. Merchandise, albums and national tours accompanied the most successful. The commercials in between programmes were, for the most part, advertisements for other Disney Channel-related works and products. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the unforgettable glitzy aesthetic – glittery flip phones, embroidered jeans, hot pink baby T-shirts – that defined each show. I remember turning on the Disney Channel and wishing I had Hannah Montana’s sparkly scarf collection or one of Raven Baxter’s signature jackets!
Hilary Duff’s Lizzie McGuire is one of the fashion icons of the early 2000s. Re-watching episodes of the Disney series is a highly effective visual time capsule of the trends of the time. Perhaps this is why Lizzie McGuire has endured as a beloved heroine and style icon in the wake of a major revival of 90s and early 2000s fashion trends in recent years. Butterfly clips, scrunchies, chokers, graffiti tops and low-rise jeans are all regular features. But Lizzie’s biggest fashion moment came in the climax of The Lizzie McGuire Movie, in the performance of “What Dreams are Made Of”. Lizzie rips off her Cinderella-style skirt to reveal low-rise, wide-legged trousers, paired with a crop top and a short blazer-style jacket, all in dazzling holographic fabric.
If you were a Disney Channel kid/teen, you may have outgrown some of the tacky Y2K styles seen on some of our favourite characters. However, the creators of TikTok have been serving up nostalgia, recreating the best of Disney Channel looks to take us back to our sequin roots and reinspire us all.
This usually involves lots of sparkly, colourful fabrics, short-sleeved shirts worn over long-sleeved shirts, and dresses worn over baggy blue jeans. The fits and silhouettes, which have the haphazard air of children allowed to dress with minimal parental interference, have become synonymous with Y2K fashion – or at least our memories of it. Case in point: When actress Katie Holmes wore a minidress over jeans earlier this year, people’s imaginations went straight to the Disney Channel. Many online made comparisons to a viral photo of High School Musical and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody star Ashley Tisdale wearing a similar outfit in 2005.
The outfits worn by some of our favourite Disney Channel characters from the ’00s have lived rent-free in my head ever since my fashion-hungry 8-year-old self first laid eyes on them. They’ve been the subject of much ridicule, but I’ve always admired their audacity. The clash. The clash. The sheer number of layers.
With the renaissance of Y2K, Disney Channel fashion serves a special kind of nostalgia. We’ve had the diamonds and the flares and the baguette bags. But the particular kind of noughties maximalism – dresses over jeans, hats and beads, scarves and leg warmers – that the Disney Channel stylists of yore exemplified may be the next frontier. So this year’s style inspiration feels fitting: the looks had a beautifully chaotic energy that has always appealed to me, and even more so now. If the next few years are going to be as tumultuous as we hope they will be, I’d like to look like chaos. To reclaim the instability that the last year has thrown at us and turn it into pure fun.
Now that thrifting is so ubiquitous, the sheer quantity of clothes required for such styling also feels practical. The philosophy is simple: ‘wear it all’. As in, literally, wear as many clothes as you can fit on your body. In shows like Hannah Montana, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, That’s So Raven and Wizards of Waverly Place, we rarely saw looks with fewer than ten elements, or episodes with fewer than several outfit changes. I like to think of the wardrobe department as a kind of Willy Wonka factory: garments on tap instead of chocolate. It sounds like a dream, but it’s not that far off from the almost limitless wardrobe we now have at our fingertips. Beyond the constant spew of styles from fast-fashion brands, we now have the infinite treasure troves of eBay and Depop just a tap-tap away.
While the Disney Channel stylists can’t be credited with starting many of the trends they reference, they can be applauded for the magic they create with their work. Every character living in the parallel Disney universe had a fantasy wardrobe to match: almost-normal clothes that were somehow always MORE, elevated by finely balanced cocktails of colour and perfectly composed piles of accessories. The result was a special kind of extra-ness that can only be described as ‘Disney’.
