Films
Netflix Thailand Subscription Price Has Just Gone Down
Netflix Thailand has officially announced a new price for base subscriptions We’ve ...
Many are familiar with Y2K—a term originally tied to the Year 2000 and the global anticipation of a technological meltdown that never came. Beyond the tech aspect, Y2K left a lasting imprint on fashion, with recognised elements such as rhinestones, sequins, fitted tops, low-rise baggy pants and chunky jewellery. But now, as 2025 unfolds, we’re stepping into the future with Y3K—a vision inspired by the year 3000. Today, Koktail invites you to journey into tomorrow with us, embracing the future and all its boundless imagination.
But first, let’s dive into what Y3K looks like. Lately, Y3K’s futuristic visions have steadily and slowly become a major influence, especially in music videos, particularly in K-pop. This aesthetic is a celebration of virtual fantasies and futuristic dreams, heavily inspired by sci-fi visuals and outer space. Key elements include metallic fabrics, unearthly textures, reflective surfaces—a mix of cyberpunk and space-age chic—and a palette dominated by silvers, blacks and greys.
Here are some Y3K references recently seen in pop culture.
LISA’s Rockstar Lookbook
In this 2024 visual, Lisa embraces silver, chunky crystalline surfaces and bold metallic waves, exuding futuristic elegance. The bracelet, crafted from sleek chrome and metallic elements, evokes a sense of technological advancement.
Meanwhile, the incorporation of tooth gems draws immediate attention, offering an alien-like aesthetic that transports us to a space-age fantasy. This accessory choice is quite literally a tangible portal to a cyber-enhanced imagination of Y3K. It’s a bold leap beyond the Y2K-era chunky jewellery trend, reimagined for a high-tech future that feels at home in the year 3000.
For her headscarf, the design may appear simple, yet this black-and-white patterned print stays true to the greyish-hued futuristic palette, blending fashion with function in this distinctly digital-age style. The entire outfit balances minimalism and innovation, capturing the spirit of a time where the virtual and the physical converge.
Aespa’s Whiplash Official Music Video
Whiplash, Aespa’s fifth mini album released in October 2024, directly presents the futuristic aesthetic with cutting-edge Y3K cyber fashion. The music video and promotional visuals feature the members draped in sleek metallic tops, each with a unique wavy design, complemented by chunky, alien-inspired sunglasses. This marks an innovative artistic direction, pushing boundaries and offering one of the most distinctive visual concepts ever seen in K-pop.
The styling is once again built on a bold monochromatic palette of black, white and metallic silver, establishing a sleek foundation for this sci-fi-inspired Y3K aesthetic. Sculptural metalwork is integrated directly into garments, alongside asymmetrical cut-outs and architectural silhouettes that defy traditional garment construction, pushing the boundaries of fashion to evoke a futuristic vision in clothing.
Tyla’s Dolce & Gabbana dress at Milan Fashion Week 2023
Tyla’s choice to wear this archival Dolce & Gabbana piece at Milan Fashion Week 2023 created a fascinating dialogue between past and present fashion. The dress, from the Spring/Summer 2007 collection, is a laminated leather construction that gives it an avant-garde aesthetic, with futuristic imagery falling into the Y3K concept. Its architectural silhouette and glossy finish were groundbreaking when first presented on the runway. Now, in 2025, it remains a vision of the future for fashion.
What makes this styling particularly interesting is its connection to pop culture history—the same design was memorably worn by Lady Gaga for her Paparazzi promotional materials in 2009. Another note to highlight is how Gaga has consistently been ahead of her time, with her boundary-pushing style defining much of 2010s fashion. Tyla’s revival of this piece, over a decade later, demonstrates both the cyclical nature of fashion and how emerging artists continue to reference and reinterpret iconic fashion moments.
Gentle Monster’s collaboration with Thug Club: The TECHNO-01 Collection
The two brands themselves channel peak Y3K aesthetics with chrome-plated, tech-dystopian stores and products, featuring holographic accents, asymmetrical cuts and metallic finishes. It merges late-90s cyber-fashion, known for its futuristic, rebellious spirit, with modern Web3 culture, which emphasises decentralisation and digital ownership. This fusion reflects fashion’s current obsession with millennial tech nostalgia—a longing for the technology, aesthetics and digital experiences of the late 90s and early 2000s, when early video games, retro interfaces and bulky smartphones shaped emerging digital culture.
This TECHNO-01 line was one of the most eagerly anticipated in Gentle Monster’s 2023 drops. It features structured silhouettes and silver lines wrapping around the legs of the shades, creating an avatar-like barrier—straightforwardly referencing Y3K’s exploration of digital identity and augmented reality. In one’s view, these wraparound shields can also be seen as a reference to both vintage ski goggles and next-gen VR headsets, embodying Y3K’s characteristic blending of past visions of the future with future interpretations of the past.
XG’s Woke Up Official Music Video
XG’s Woke Up, released in 2024, presents cyber-brutalism, which can be seen as a subset of the futurism within Y3K imaginaries, all while adding intrigue by drawing visual narrative from the primal power of wolf mythology.
Before dropping the track, their Y3K references begin with a digital cleanse—their social media wiped clean, replaced by a single, questionable image: chrome fangs beneath a glossed black lip, centred by an all-seeing eye. This neo-gothic motif embodies the Y3K movement’s fascination with avant-garde, never-before-seen imaginaries.
The styling in Woke Up reads like a manifesto of Y3K’s core elements, where the girls traverse multiple dimensions of the aesthetic: utilitarian astronaut suits with exaggerated proportions echo the movement’s obsession with space-age pragmatism, while strong-shouldered silhouettes in technical fabrics speak to the architectural influence of cyber-fashion. On top of this, diaphanous, gossamer gowns provide a contradictory softness—a hallmark of Y3K’s tension between hard and soft futurism.
In the track itself, each member—Jurin, Chisa, Cocona, Hinata, Maya, Juria and Harvey—contributes powerfully to this, but worth pointing out is Cocona’s real-time head shaving, which delivers shock value while embodying Y3K’s dedication to transformation and the rejection of traditional practices. The act itself becomes performance art in the sense of blending human vulnerability with the clinical precision of modern metamorphosis.
