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10 Fashion Items That Went From CRINGE To COOL

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Everything you swore you’d never wear again is suddenly the thing everyone’s wearing.

TheThings Celebrity built its rundown “10 Fashion Items That Went From CRINGE To COOL” around a simple premise: closet relics that got mocked out of existence in the 2000s clawed their way back into rotation by 2017, this time with a designer price tag attached. The channel walks through a decade-plus of tourist gear, gym-class staples and grunge leftovers that runway houses and street-style photographers rehabilitated one by one.

• Fanny packs, long tied to the stereotypical tourist look, got reworked into upscale utility accessories worn cross-body by street-style regulars.
• Crocs, once treated as a punchline, picked up high-fashion collaborations that turned the foam clog into an intentional statement piece rather than a mistake.
• Chokers, bomber jackets, neon color palettes and overalls all resurfaced from their ’90s and 2000s peak to become 2017 wardrobe staples.

The Fanny Pack’s Upscale Rebrand

Nothing captured the “cringe to cool” arc better than the fanny pack. For years it was shorthand for the dad-on-vacation look — a bulky pouch strapped around the waist with zero style credibility. The breakdown traces how designers repackaged the exact same function, hands-free, practical carrying, into something worn deliberately across the chest or hip, with better materials and cleaner silhouettes replacing the nylon tourist version.

That’s the pattern across most of the list: the utility never changed, only the packaging did. Once the fanny pack showed up styled with tailored pieces instead of cargo shorts, it stopped reading as a joke and started reading as intentional.

Neon, Overalls and the ’90s Rewind

Neon color palettes went through the same cycle. Big in the ’80s and ’90s, then dismissed as tacky for the better part of two decades, neon yellow, pink and green found their way back onto runways and into street-style shoots by the mid-2010s. Overalls followed a nearly identical path — once written off as something a toddler would wear, they came back reworked in corduroy and suede, treated as a legitimate layering piece instead of a costume.

Chokers and bomber jackets round out that same ’90s-revival lane the video spends time on. Both were once considered dated enough to avoid entirely; both ended up back in heavy rotation as those decades’ aesthetics cycled back into mainstream style.

Crocs Go From Punchline to Runway Piece

The clearest example of a full reputational turnaround is Crocs. For years the brand was fashion’s easiest target — foam, holes, zero pretense of style. The video breaks down how high-fashion collaborations changed that math entirely, giving the clog a designer stamp that reframed it as a deliberate style choice instead of a fashion faux pas.

What was once considered unfashionable can quickly become a trendy must-have item — fashion is always evolving.

Dad sneakers got the same treatment on the footwear side. Chunky, oversized silhouettes that used to be strictly a middle-aged-guy look got embraced by brands like Balenciaga and Nike, who leaned into the exaggerated proportions instead of smoothing them out. The same logic that saved the fanny pack — take the “uncool” thing at face value and dress it up — worked just as well on shoes.

The Rest of the Countdown

The video rounds out its ten with a few more closet exiles that quietly made their way back: bike shorts paired with oversized tees or blazers, scrunchies redone in velvet and silk instead of scrunched-up elastic, bell bottoms returning after skinny jeans dominated the 2000s, bucket hats resurfacing from their grunge-era peak, and chunky acrylic or enamel jewelry replacing the delicate pieces that had dominated for years. None of it is treated as ironic by 2017 — it’s just what’s being worn.

The through-line the whole breakdown keeps landing on is that fashion’s “no” pile has an expiration date. Give it long enough and a big enough designer name attached, and the same fanny pack your dad wore at Disney World ends up on a street-style blog, no irony required.