The glut of 90’s-centric fashion has finally led the Times to an obvious source of influence: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, wearing all those poufy floral patterned dresses, often paired with jackets and boots. Writer William Van Meter thinks her look incorporated a range of styles, including “early American settler, gypsy, business casual, pious zealot.” Of course, in it’s latest incarnation, “the layered floral/tough girl Elaine look is nostalgic.”

What’s weirder is how Van Meter explains the current embrace of this style as an amalgam of “this season’s trends of the early ’90s and the working woman” (love how those are both analogous “trends”). He claims many hipsters decked out in Elaine-inspired outfits “are too young to realize whom they are referencing”–dubious, since Seinfeld is in constant syndication–and quotes one stylist who attributes it to a backlash against the tight, short clothes women embraced not long ago: “This is a more covered-up look and looking like you have a brain. Elaine had a job. She worked at J. Peterman. She was a go-getter.” A career girl role model in blousy calico! Next up, Murphy Brown (or did I just miss that one?).

Elsewhere in Thursday Styles, Jon Caramanica plays Critical Shopper at Scout Vintage T-Shirts, a store full of “questionable pasts…a small warehouse of rejected memories.” He writes:

I pondered what made some shirts, once vessels of memory, acceptable detritus. Did people no longer wish to advertise that they had survived the 1989 Bay Area earthquake ($38) or the Wisconsin blizzard of 1982 ($28)? (True survivors — which is to say, true victims — probably didn’t buy commemorative T-shirts.) Did the Pulaski Academy Jogathon ($18) not merit a memento?

Good questions. And in the end, I have to respect the fact that Caramanica goes into places like this with clear boundaries: “I won’t buy something I, or my imagined self, wouldn’t have worn in its original time period. Clothes send messages, and I have no interest in looking like someone else’s yesteryear.”