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Color-blocked jeans, bold-lettered tees, and a message stitched into every garment: "Clothing Without Prejudice." Cross Colours dressed the Fresh Prince, half of early-90s hip-hop, and every kid who wanted to look like MTV — then vanished almost overnight when its biggest retailer went bankrupt.
"I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller." Skee-Lo's 1995 single was rap's great self-deprecating hit, a shortlist of everything he wasn't, rapped over a bouncing sample with a '74 Pinto where the '64 Impala should be. It went top 15, got a Grammy nomination, and became the one song everyone can still quote.
Three straight titles and one long argument about whose team it was. With Phil Jackson arriving in 1999, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant ran off the 2000, 2001, and 2002 championships, the 15–1 postseason, and Robert Horry's buzzer-beater, until Shaq was traded to Miami in July 2004 and Kobe re-signed the next day.
Lauren Conrad left Laguna Beach for Los Angeles, a Teen Vogue internship, and four years of impeccably lit drama about whether any of it was real. The Hills perfected the scripted-or-not reality soap — then ended the whole argument with television's greatest mic drop, pulling the camera back to reveal a studio backlot.
FX's first drama opened with Vic Mackey shooting a fellow cop and spent seven seasons making you root for him anyway. Michael Chiklis shaved his head, lost the weight and won the Emmy, and basic cable found out it could do what HBO did.
"The Coast Is Toast": a volcano erupts out of the La Brea Tar Pits and sends lava rolling down Wilshire Boulevard, with only Tommy Lee Jones and some concrete freeway barriers standing in its way. The other half of 1997's inexplicable dueling-volcano-movie showdown — and the one that lost.
The pleated, high-waisted, tapered pants with the white Z. Cavaricci label running down the fly, so nobody could miss what you paid for. They ruled the mall from the late 1980s until the trend collapsed in 1991 and nearly took the company with it.