The first time I heard the phrase “boom boom” was at a fashion show in January: Prada in Milan. While I sat waiting for something incredibly tasteful to appear on the catwalk, out marched a bare-chested model with a pashmina-sized fur draped over his shoulders. Then came another, and another, and then one more in a huge fur hood. The fur was shearling – skin from a recently shorn sheep or lamb; usually, as in Prada’s case, a byproduct of the meat industry, so marginally less problematic – but still. You see some strange things on catwalks these days, but “fur” isn’t usually one of them.
Except it didn’t stop there. Later, there was “fur” at Emporio Armani and yeti coats at Dolce & Gabbana. By the time the womenswear shows had finished in March, “fur” (mostly fake, occasionally real) had appeared in about 70% of the shows. Along with that were exaggerated shoulders at Saint Laurent, Pretty Woman thigh-high boots at Stella McCartney and pointy bras at Miu Miu. These shows seemed to be saying that fashion wants us to look rich, gauche and glamorous. Or, to use a phrase coined by the trend forecaster Sean Monahan, who gave the world normcore (2014) and vibe shift (2022), fashion wants us to look boom boom.
If you are new to the phrase, don’t panic. As a forecaster whose job involves mapping cultural moments on to prevailing trends, Monahan says “the curse with doing predictions is that sometimes you go too early”. It may take some time for most of us to start wearing fur coats and miniskirts. “But it is happening in the wild,” he says.
Monahan has described boom boom as “a pure expression of excess”, a world in which “male-coded values … have come roaring back”. “I’m always looking at what people wear around me, the one thing that sticks out,” he says now. With the vibe shift, it was trucker hats (a favourite of the Strokes). With boom boom, it is men who don’t work in offices wearing suits and loafers, alongside women dressed up in “expressive big silhouettes and fur”. Until recently, he says, “no one was wearing a suit unless they worked in finance. Five years ago, people would have screamed at you for wearing even leather.”
Boom boom is glamour and greed, epitomised by a style and mindset reminiscent of the sleazy, money-saturated world of late 80s New York. There is an end-of-empire, end-of-history nihilism to it, a sense of raising another bottle of Moët into the air while the world burns around you. But it’s also about aspiration, panic and the jarring disconnection between the economic climate we want and the one that exists – an experience shared by most. As McCartney said backstage after her “laptop to lapdance” collection earlier this month: “Instead of going: I’m anxious [about the world] and I’m scared of all the feelings which we’re attached to, I’m like: fuck fear. I’m flipping it.” Easy for her to say, you may think.
Already there are signs of boom boom trickling into culture. Take Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon in season three of The White Lotus, all golden tan and button-down shirts, and Mikey Madison’s titular, Oscar-winning role in Anora, complete with a Hervé Léger bandage dress and a six-figure sable coat. It’s Mark Zuckerberg sporting a $300,000 Rolex to a UFC fight. It’s caviar being sold on Deliveroo and eaten on chicken nuggets by Rihanna. It’s Kim Kardashian posing next to a Tesla robot on the cover of Perfect magazine.
In fashion, it has been there for a while: red-carpet stylists peddling Old Hollywood glamour at the Oscars (take Demi Moore’s crystal-embellished Armani Privé dress); a naked Bianca Censori dropping her fur coat at the Grammys. It’s secondhand Chanel handbags at John Lewis, party-girl polka dots at M&S and the growing popularity of weight-loss drugs in the fashion world, the body positivity movement seemingly forgotten. It’s this summer’s mooted return of Fyre festival, which summed up all the absurdity and injustice of late capitalism when it failed so spectacularly the first time around. It’s doing shots.
Recently, Monahan has landed on 1987 as a reference point. This was the year the US Vogue editor Anna Wintour arrived in New York and Donald Trump published The Art of the Deal. Tina Brown, the patron saint of celebrity culture, with her “black tie, red nails, whole big swirl” glamour (as recounted in an interview for her memoir The Vanity Fair Diaries), was the queen of New York. (When approached for this article, Brown said she had not heard of the term boom boom, but that she would “study up on it”.)
Then, as now, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. On either side of the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were well into their neoliberal revolutions, crushing the welfare state as they enriched the 1%.
Conspicuous consumerism had evolved into vice-signalling – 1987 was the year Bill Cosby was on the cover of Time magazine, alongside the headline: “Funny, famous, fifty and filthy rich!” The film Wall Street and Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho, which turns glamour and frivolity into emptiness and greed (“There is no real me,” claims its protagonist, Patrick Bateman), were also set in that year. The film’s Armani coats, real furs and Cerruti power suits are not faithful to the book (Calvin Klein and Comme des Garçons refused to lend their clothes), but speak to Bateman’s empty yuppie aesthetic and are not far off what popped up on Milan’s catwalks (or what A$AP Rocky – and Rihanna – recently wore to court). Then there was Black Monday, when the stock market fell to its lowest point since the Wall Street crash of 1929.
With Trump’s re-election, technological and financial instability and the crucial addition of climate catastrophe (which in 1987 was a shadow in the background rather than a constantly exploding bomb), the time for a revival of boom boom mentality is ripe.
Between the cost of living crisis, stagnant wage growth and a competitive job market, it’s no secret that many young people are struggling. A study last year by Yorkshire Building Society and the consultancy Public First showed that more than half of gen Z workers – those aged between 16 and 27 – have not saved any of their income in the past two years.
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Boom boom is about people dressing for the income they want rather than the income they have. It’s not just a cultural shift towards the past; it’s another lurch to the right. It’s the much-discussed post‑pandemic “revenge dressing” we were promised.
Monahan insists the trend is not political, but admits it does dovetail with global events: “Let’s not forget it’s young people that swung the vote [for Trump].” Still, he thinks boom boom is as much a reaction against how we have been dressing lately as it is a political statement. The post-pandemic mass casualisation – into which normcore fed – reached its apotheosis when the working-from-home look became the “de facto adult dress code”, he says. “It’s the classic pendulum swing: young people rejecting what grownups are doing, while working out what it means to dress like an adult, all inching its way into fashion.”
It’s also a reaction against “woke culture”. Over email, one fashion PR in her mid-20s who owns a vintage fur coat (and therefore wishes to remain anonymous) said she found the catwalk shows this season comically ironic. “None of us can afford this stuff, but that’s part of it. We can’t afford anything we’re ‘supposed’ to wear,” she says. “Most of the people who’ve heard of boom boom weren’t even born then, so it’s basically cosplaying your parents – if your parents were wealthy.” She sends me a link to Victoria Beckham’s sardonic “My dad had a Rolls-Royce” T-shirt.
It’s no coincidence that the loadsamoney revivalism has landed on our laps in the week that the Duchess of Sussex released a £10,000 shoppable wardrobe based on the clothes she wears in her new TV show. With her cream jeans and striped shirts, it’s giving “quiet luxury”, the 2022 high-fashion trend that centred on clothing of monastic blandness, frightening prices and subtle signifiers of wealth.
Neither look is particularly winning. The difference is that boom boom isn’t trying to be. “The American elite is in flux,” says Monahan. “For a long time, it was about people not wanting to flaunt wealth. There is still an audience for stealth wealth, but it’s older and small-C conservative. Now, it’s unclear where people are in the status hierarchy.” Quiet luxury and normcore, he says, are “avoidant”: “They are attempts not to make a statement.” Boom boom is the opposite.
