Today, most teenagers are tentative to jump on the latest fashion trend and will choose to dress like the mainstream. However, some students pride themselves on their original fashion by taking popular trends of the past decades and adding a modern twist to them to create something new: vintage cool.

“It’s taking the best stuff from the past and using it in new ways,” Tova Byrne ’15 said. Byrne considers vintage jackets to be “her thing” (her favorite clothing item is a vintage canvas farm jacket she bought at a flea market).

Like Byrne, Harley Kowalsky ’15  is a supporter of the vintage trend. Some of the most prominent styles she notices are denim pieces such as overalls, jean jackets, high-waisted Levi’s and ripped denim.

Many of these styles have been revived by chain-stores. “Vintage grunge looks have been modernized in 2014 by going through an ‘Urban Outfitter-fication,’” vintage-wearer Doug Raigosa ’16 said.

He believes the clothes manufactured were made to look vintage, but do not have the same originality as pieces he buys from Goodwill, Pacific Sunwear and Rue 21.

While many students always wear vintage fashion, there are others who wish to incorporate the trend in their style. “I wear J. Crew so vintage isn’t really my thing,” Katherine Coogan ’17 said. “But I wish I knew how to pull off the overalls look.”

These trends are mostly shown in the media by celebrities and indie and alternative bands. Students are fans of celebrities such as Alexa Chung, Nina Nesbitt and Miley Cyrus who advocate originality with vintage-wear.

  Hayley Foote ’17, who is a fan of alternative bands such as The 1975, The Strokes, Cage the Elephant and Kodaline, believes that bands like these are making their way into the mainstream media. “The whole look they give off of being really grungy is becoming more common because of their popularity,” she said.

“As a society, we look back at the 90s and think, ‘Oh man, what were we thinking?’” Byrne said. However, the cringe-inducing styles of the past have been reinvented by students who are able to take old trends and turn them into something more modern and fashionable.