Greeted by the salutary ring of the door-chimes, subdued 70s music and the stale smell of old flannel, I entered a hole-in-the-wall vintage store: a dime-a-dozen in downtown Manhattan. I hastily skimmed the T-shirt rack, having just purchased a faux-vintage T in Urban Outfitters for more than I care to admit. I fondled a silk neck scarf adorned with pink flamingos tragically accessorized with turquoise highlights and strolled by the used foot ware -- a prospect which always made me slightly uncomfortable. But moving on to the skirts, pants and blouses, I noticed something alarmingly amiss. These staple vintage items, which usually scream of the hyperactive color palette of decades past and provide a store with sufficient, if not appealing, decoration, were comprised of a monotonous, clean-cut spectrum of black, gray and cream.Having inspected the flickering overhead light to assure the implausibility of an optical illusion, I curiously approached a plain, white button-down shirt leading the procession. While nothing could have escaped the 80s in one color and perfect symmetry, perhaps it was once the centerpiece of a long skirt and a flower wreath, incessantly brushed by unruly blonde hair? But the crisp, clean material and shinny buttons suggested otherwise, and I climactically turned to the tag for verification. GAP! This alleged relic of days gone by smelled, looked and felt younger than the infamous Capri fad of the mid-90s. I felt duped.

Replacing the anachronistic item, my hope for redemption of vintage integrity was placed on the remaining merchandise. One after another: rich blue Contempo flares (not bell-bottoms, mind you), black mini-skirts from Express and the myriad of khakis still occasionally sported by Old Navy mannequins settled a lurking implication of the swiftly changing calendar pages; The 90s were officially vintage.

I wanted to assemble my fellow shoppers (all three of them), strip the racks bare and declare to the apathetic cashier: "It's just not time yet!" Three years into a decade I don't even know what to call, I'm still dating my forms 2001, counting five years from the demise of grunge and complaining about living in the 90s. According to the theory of the decade, brilliantly articulated in "Dazed and Confused," if one decade is 'boring,' the next should be 'radical.' But when the cultural transition is marked by nothing more distinct than a plunging pant-waist and a coup d'etat of pop music, referring to the beginning of the millennium as a significant temporal shift seems to be an insincere linguistic technicality.

Holding a J. Crew sweater from a collection I still remembered, redefining my definition of vintage, and musing over the special relativity theory as the possible culprit in the speed and homogeny of the passing years, I didn't just feel old and philosophically stunted. Even if I could accept the 90s as a chunk of history filed away in the unorganized file cabinets of my memory and in musty second-hand stores, I couldn't accept the insipid unoriginality of the decade's cultural residue. While the demure black pea coat and burgundy V-neck from circa 1995 were more fashionable and versatile than the plaid bell-bottoms hanging near by, they were filtered and streamlined versions of fashions engendered and exhausted through out the century.

I wasn't sad for the 90s, I was sad for our youth. Having skidded through the 80s in whatever our parents pulled over our heads, we found the 90s to be the hey-day of our self-expression. Those of us whose teen angst blossomed in the three or four years in which grunge reigned were lucky enough to soak in every morsel of the music/fashion revolution, and for a glittering moment, we saw the 90s as a fountainhead of a momentous trend. But after the death of Kurt Cobain, musical icons faded into MTV legends, jeans were patched at the knees, oversized flannel shirts were disposed of and the decade became an indistinct mainstream regurgitation of old fads and trite music.

But 'pop music' wasn't always a cacophony of plastic, mass-marketed puppets of the pre-teen controlled record agencies. 'Popular' music vibrated through the 70s as revolutionary rock, echoing poetry and political strife, and popular culture rocked the 80s in fads and colors that won't soon be forgotten. And if disco came in the package, so be it.

Of course the soundtrack of the 90s wasn't entirely bubblegum pop (thank you grunge, hip-hop, techno, alternative) and the costumes did boast of some innovation (thank you cargo pants, flares, canvas shoes, layers). But seeing a decade I didn't even know had passed summed up in bland jeans and turtlenecks, I felt no solidarity with the fads, trends and artifacts of my youth.