By Annie Brown
There is perhaps nothing that encapsulates a moment in time better than a 'going out top.' It speaks to being 20-something, drinks that definitely had Red Bull as a mixer and the best part of the night being the 'pre-loading' with your girlfriends as you all got ready at the same house (an apartment that featured a lava lamp, that Le Chat Noir poster and practically no food in the fridge).
It's a time when a night out needed a new top - preferably something sequinned, cropped, halter-necked, or all of these things at once - plus a pair of chandelier earrings from Sportsgirl to jazz up the whole look.
The going out top was represented at Saint Laurent at Paris Fashion Week this year. Credit: FRANCOIS MORI
It was especially relevant to women of a certain age. As Leah Chernikoff noted for Elle.com of the going out top in 2014, "This kind of top had its heyday in the early aughts, but it persists today. And it almost always ends up in the back of a drawer, covered in spilled drinks and shame, never to be worn again."
Because wasn't it that wearing these tops rather unfortunately clashed with the times in your life when you were a bit more uncertain about what you liked, or who you liked, or whether or not you even enjoyed drinking jagerbombs or just did so to fit in. Photos from that time - sometimes even printed out because this was before evidence of a good night was posted to social media as it was happening - show a time stamp in the corner and red tinged teeth from sugary drinks. There's hopefulness and drunkenness and youth. We were so young and our clothes were so bad.
Paris Hilton, poster girl for the going out top circa 2004. Credit: JIM RUYMEN
Only a lucky few escaped from the going out top, those that always knew their style and wore things like oversized man sweaters long before we all coveted them for that 'French girl' look. Then we wanted to look sexy - so embarrassing to admit now when silhouettes continue to get wider and insouciance reigns - even if it meant spending a night tugging at a top that was a little snug and keeping away from naked flames.
And so we moved on from the going out top, or maybe it moved on too. Because now, when you can wear your pyjamas to dinner and athleisure continues to dominate, and Louis Vuitton is collaborating with streetwear label Supreme, do we even need to get dressed up anymore? Or, more to the point, do we even need to try anymore?
But fashion is fickle and perhaps the going out top, the antithesis of 'effortlessness' - that impossible goal that takes so much work to emulate - is having a comeback.
Leandra Medine at Man Repeller thinks so - noting that Kendall Jenner copied Paris Hilton, perhaps the poster child for the going out top in the early 000s, and wore a sequinned halter dress to her 21st birthday. And we're seeing it on the runway too.
As Medine says to back up her theory of the return of the going out top, "What is not disappointing, however, is our close proximity to a genuine resuscitation, punctuated by the Fall 2017 runway season. Anthony Vaccarello's second collection for Saint Laurent, for example, was practically an homage to the nightclubs of the 2000s. And there have been halter tops everywhere — the kind that look like Kate Moss once wore them, and those that may moonlight as belts. Look no further than London's Marques'Almeida or Ashish, Milan's Gucci, or New York's Rosie Assoulin."
Maybe the difference here though is the confidence of these new going out tops. There's no second guessing yourself in Rosie Assoulin, with her just-right cutaways and plays on proportion, or Anthony Vaccarello for his second season for Saint Laurent - with his 80s-tastic sharp angles and leather and sexiness is for going out in and dancing on tables.
So if the going out top is having a comeback - a pushback, perhaps, on all those oversized shirts and Netflix and chill and not changing out of your gym kit in the office and trying to look like a 'French girl' - this time it's the grownup version. For women who know what drink they like, and what cuts suit them, and who dance just as wildly as they used to.