What Fashion Looked Like 20 Years Ago: The Best of the Spring 2005 Collections

Here at Vogue Runway it’s become a tradition to look back at what fashion looked like 20 years before the onset of a new season. Revisiting the collections of 2005 was illuminating. I saw punk ballerinas at Comme des Garçons, deft fabric manipulations at Helmut Lang, and Grès-like drapery at Yohji Yamamoto and Lanvin (then designed by Alber Elbaz). Calvin Klein’s Francisco Costa was keeping minimalism alive in New York, as Jil Sander was doing in Milan, while in contrast Alexander McQueen and Undercover’s Jun Takahashi proposed pure fantasy.

Still other designers worked an easy, lived-in, even crinkled aesthetic. Tank shapes, polo shirts, and henleys were paired with pants with a generous Katharine Hepburn–esque cut. A vacation-ready collegiate vibe animated some collections, where others were marked with ladylike eccentricity; and then, as now, boho was back.

The more time I spent with the spring 2005 season the more familiar they felt; the trends I saw at Copenhagen Fashion Week and the recent resort collections were in evidence in the shows of two decades ago: things like bubble skirts, polo shirts, and long shorts, and deconstruction. It got me thinking that Jason Farago was right about the slow-down of cultural evolution.

But it’s not only aesthetics that link spring 2005 to spring 2025; the plight of independent designers hasn’t seemed to change much, either. One indelible image from 20 years ago is of Miguel Adrover taking his bow in a T-shirt that read “Anyone Seen a Backer?” Such “unicorns” continue to be elusive even while talent thrives.

Below, designs that have stood the test of time and which just might give us clues to fashion’s next moves.