Most Januarys are broadly similar. The lunchtime wait in line at M&S to exchange that dodgy Christmas gift cardigan, the treadmills jammed with runners trying to remember how to work the controls, the Dry January martyrs making a massive song and dance about every Diet Coke in the pub.
But this particular January feels tangibly different. Seldom has a new year begun with a zeitgeist united in such bloody-minded optimism. The social media mood on New Year’s Day was a curious mix of blitz spirit (“We can do this!”) and VE Day demob-fever (“We did it!”). The afterburn of 2016 is being felt in our collective determination to bring a better year into being through sheer force of will. Last year had more than its fair share of obscure buzzwords – from Kondo to post-truth to hygge – but the first of this year is one that everyone can rally around. Optimism is so hot right now.
This is big picture stuff, but style is part of it, because on an individual level even big picture stuff gets expressed in small ways. Profound statements are posted on Instagram, and liked by your immediate family. And what you wear to face 2017 is a statement, too. In Susie Boyt’s book My Judy Garland Life, she writes that one of the lessons she learned from her heroine is that “Glamour is a moral stance.” Dressing to cheer and brighten the world in 2017 – whether by red lipstick or a Choose Life T-shirt – is a generous act. And so it is that the look of 2017 has a different slant to what went before. More cheerful, more colourful, more outward looking. With the benefit of hindsight, the athleisure trend that dominated the first half of 2016 seems to signify not simply the wholesome, healthsome vibe it represented at the time, but something about self-obsession and a brazenness about celebrating the shallows of humanity, which played out on a meta scale later in the year.
