File under “Wish I’d Kept Mine."  It’s socially acceptable now, for the first time in fifteen years, for women to wear plaid flannel shirts.  (Although it seems that they never fell out of fashion in some parts.)  It’s not the first time that I can remember a trend from its most recent incarnation (neons, boyfriend jeans, camouflage), but it’s the first time a trend seems to have returned so quickly, and in a virtually identical form.  Maybe the fabric and fit in the new flannel shirts are more sophisticated, but they look like the same flannel shirts we were wearing in 1992.  That was when Vogue published their iconic "grunge” spread, featuring a glammed-down Naomi Campbell and a Goth-punk Kristin Mcmenamy (curiously prefiguring Lisbeth Salander) lounging around a meadow in drab, unformed dresses and knits.

In an essay in last month’s Vanity Fair Kurt Andersen laments that our style evolution has stalled.  People today, he says, are wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music, and driving the same cars they did twenty years ago.  The circuits of progress have somehow gotten jammed.  At the same time cycles of fashion design, production and media have become accelerated, our way of dressing has also changed.  Fashion now is less about dressing in a prescribed look from head to toe than than about assembling an outfit from specially-curated individual pieces.  So, for a lady, the return of the plaid flannel shirt isn’t about grunge, but about finding the perfect plaid flannel shirt for herself and knowing what jeans and boots to wear it with.  And it’s about holding onto that shirt so that the next time it comes back into fashion she’ll be ready.