This was the year that reignited our love for fashion. After the truly heinous 2020 - a deeply traumatizing year that gave us all emotional and mental scars - 2021 felt like a cautious step closer to being OK again. There was a collective feeling of "We all made it through the worst of it!" A global exhale of sorts that felt OK (or at least a little more OK) enough to celebrate silly, superficial things like fashion and pop culture again. Red carpets were back! It was OK to laugh at memes! Fashion Weeks returned! Celebrity couple debuts were no longer relegated to just Instagram posts, so we were allowed to celebrate Bennifer 2.0 the way we were truly meant to: through glorious paparazzi yacht pics from Saint-Tropez! Designers pivoted from cozy, homebound, tie-dye sweatsuits into ultra-aesthetics like cottagecore, dark academia, rodeo glam, and Y2K nostalgia! It was a sigh of relief, a feeling of normalcy.
Of course, all is not perfect, and we have a long way to go, but I'm here to celebrate the little victories. Let's savor the sartorial wade into the shallow end and the return of fashion by reliving the very best moments from 2021.