1 week Ago By Daisy Jones
When people talk about early 2000s style , they’ll often talk about Juicy Couture and Von Dutch and rhinestones. They’ll talk about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and little dogs in Dior Saddle bags – tacky excess, basically. But if you were to take a stroll through any town in the UK during this time, you wouldn’t have seen much of that.
No, you’d have seen baggy jeans and muted tones and peaked beanies. You’d have seen khaki skate belts and grey hoodies and scuffed white Dunlop trainers . And maybe, if you were within the NW3 postcode, you’d have seen Keira Knightley and Jamie Dornan , probably in matching slouchy hats with their hands in each other’s back pockets, like one single entity, bound together by the tangle of their Glastonbury backstage passes.
Though Knightley and Dornan only dated for two years – in 2003 until 2005, when they were 18 and 19 respectively – they’ve become a source of intense stylistic fascination in recent years. They rarely looked chic or glam – even at parties, they often showed up in low-slung denim and a crumpled boho dress – but the appeal of two mutually hot people with such dedication to the indie drabness of the era feels almost electrifying. At a time in which we’re so used to seeing couples with Instagram face and his-and-hers Prada, this vision – of two then-emerging actors who looked like they just raided a Billabong sale – holds incredible appeal.
The closest we have to them currently is perhaps Lily-Rose Depp and 070 Shake , who I’m sure will proliferate the moodboards of Gen Alpha in a similar way. While the Y2K revival for a while meant baby tees and Mean Girls -esque glitz, we are seeing this more normcore interpretation of the era return to our wardrobes – which, to my mind, is more in line with what 2003 actually looked like. The other night, for example, I went to SET Social in Peckham, only to be greeted by a sea of 20-somethings in brown T-shirts, loose H&M jeans and eyelet belts.
We are inches, mere inches, from the return of the slouchy beanie. The classic Gap hoodie – that most preppy and plain of things – has become a must-have item. With all that in mind, it’s no wonder that Knightley and Dornan – her in suede boots, him in endless cord and a checkerboard belt – have become such a fixture on Pinterest boards and throwback fashion Instagram accounts .
The couple broke up in 2005, as most teenage couples tend to. She later went on to marry a Klaxon, while he similarly married a British musician, both of whom they’re still with. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they probably don’t think about this era in as much exacting detail as we do.
It was a flash in the pan two decades ago and they’ve presumably both moved on. But though their relationship might have died like a bedraggled festival wristband being snipped with scissors, we will never forget the impact that this couple – and their extremely low-rise jeans and adjustable belts – had on our lives and hearts. RIP to their relationship, and long live normie indie fashion.
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