KING OF PRUSSIA MALL — The secret to time travel is the camisole. Enter the portal — an Old Navy dressing room in suburban Philadelphia — put one on, and if you are a millennial of a certain age, you’ll be transported 20 years into the past.

The mall is, miraculously, just as we left it in the early aughts: The jeans are boot cut, baggy or wide legged. The scent of Auntie Anne’s pretzels permeates the air. The skirts have a bubble hem or a raw denim edge or a tiered, white prairie cut. The sound system is playing Coldplay and Avril Lavigne, and “Freaky Friday” is back in theaters. The tops are halters and tubes, and most importantly, the camisoles have a contrast lace trim. Layer as many as you can for maximum style, just like we did in high school.

And, just as in high school, we are back in a mall dressing room trying on tops — which look like the very same tops we wore in high school, because fashion and time are a flat circle, and we millennials have aged into our second go-round.

We recall when it happened to our mothers, when we begged for flare jeans, circa 1999.

“Bell bottoms, really?” they said, with a bit of disdainful amusement. “That’s the stuff we used to wear in high school.”

Mommmmm. You don’t understand.

But we do now, kind of: The generations after us have been looking to the 1990s and 2000s for fashion inspiration. The difference is that it’s being marketed to us, too. Abercrombie has ditched the soft-core marketing and logo tees in favor of elevated basics that college girlies and mid-career girlbosses alike are snapping up. Same for Gap and Old Navy, with Zac Posen at the helm. Stores that didn’t exist when we were in high school, like Aritzia and Princess Polly, are copping styles from Delia*s (RIP) and Charlotte Russe.

We put on the camisoles and the cropped, baggy jeans with flip flops, and examine our reflections in the sparse, white, cement-floored dressing room. We come out, look each other over and double over laughing. We are 14 all over again.

But a question is gnawing at us: What sort of midlife crisis might we trigger when we try on the clothes of our carefree youth, but now with mortgages and silvering hair and our first mammograms looming?

Our high school clothes are cool again. Now we’re having a midlife crisis.

As it turns out, the golden age of mall culture that we remember so fondly was more like its grand finale. New malls had cropped up in the United States every single year for the second half of the 20th century — and then in 2007, amid a nascent recession, none. By 2008, Newsweek was asking: Is the American shopping mall dead?

What was left of brick-and-mortar shopping got further decimated in 2020. But then, right on schedule, just as the 20-year nostalgia cycle would have predicted, a newly consumer-aged Gen Z started yearning for our mall-sourced 2000s styles — the Henleys, the light-wash denim, the rugby shirts, the Juicy Couture sweatsuits, the Oakley sunglasses. And shopping at the mall, they quickly learned, got them to you even faster than the next-day delivery option online.

Many of the original purveyors of these styles have lived to sell them again, some in part because they shrewdly expanded to win back millennial consumers as they aged into their adulthoods and careers. Those big, wide slacks every 30-something woman is wearing to work these days? A hefty portion of them come from Abercrombie.

And thus, here we find ourselves in 2025. In a timeline where teens in baggy cargo shorts are idling away their summer weekdays in the frosty industrial AC of the mall again, dousing themselves with testers of Abercrombie & Fitch Woods cologne. Unlike us, many of them roam around with devices that tattle their exact locations to their parents. Still, here they are, retracing our steps on the hunt for what we bought in the same place at the same age.

We learned the hard way that we’ve outgrown low-rise jeans. But we’ll never outgrow Auntie Anne’s pretzels.

Do you remember when we were teenagers, and we’d buy a hoodie or a T-shirt with numerals of a random “vintage” year on it to look cool? Well, we have some bad news for you. In Hollister, the year emblazoned across the hoodies is … 2001.

One of the authors of this story (it’s me, Maura) actually spent that very year working in a Hollister, her first real minimum-wage job. The time was very dark for the brand, both physically (the lights were always very dim) and spiritually. For a long time, the store didn’t make any clothing larger than a size 10, causing immeasurable psychic damage to a generation of teenage girls — including the other author of this story (hi, me, Ashley). But some things have changed: It got rid of the front porch-style storefront, brightened up the lights and stock size extra large now. And the distressed micro mini denim skirts have hidden shorts underneath, a welcome innovation that allows the wearer to actually bend over without showing the whole sophomore class their undies.

The “2000s Vault” collection, released this summer, features the same tiered ruffle skirts, lace-trim babydoll tops and tight cable-knit sweaters that we totally wore to that party in Zack’s parents’ basement after the football playoffs. It’s a bit of a mind warp to put them back on.

This looks cute, our brains say, but maybe it’s because they have teleported us back to that party, and suddenly we’re awash in the scent of Bath & Body Works’s Cucumber Melon Body Splash spray, and the opening melody of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” and the feeling of having a big, fat crush in an awkward teenage body …

Suddenly, the reverie gets interrupted when our adult bodies release a glissando of clicks and creaks as we wriggle out of said ruffle skirts.

It’s the same over at the Gap, when we put on capri pants — they still make us look short, we’re sorry to report — and a tube top. The AOL dial-up sound. The cheerleading squad. The halter tops and lettuce-hem dresses at Urban Outfitters. A JanSport backpack. The homecoming dance. The Henley cap sleeve T-shirt layered with a chunky belt from Lucky Brand Jeans. That first breakup. Your messy locker. The senior boys.

Claire’s, the beloved accessory shop for tweens and teens, still offers its famous deal: Piercings are free when you purchase a set of starter earrings.

In American Eagle, flipping through a pile of contrast-denim wide leg jeans — this was before the Sydney Sweeney ads earned internet scorn and a nod of approval from President Donald Trump — we discover that jeans now come in a triple zero, and gasp. We remember when the double zero was invented: 2006. A few of our old insecurities are reignited. Hollister, despite carrying larger sizes, doesn’t always have them in stock for the things we want to try. The dressing room lighting is unflattering and sallow. The Abercrombie is closed for renovations.

Throughout it all, we’re surrounded by teenage girls who are just like the teenage girls we used to be.

Their lives are different, to be fair. We didn’t have smartphones to cyberbully each other, and the world didn’t feel quite as much like it was falling apart. Our skin care routines were limited to some Clearasil and the St. Ives apricot exfoliating scrub, which felt like cleaning your face with steel wool. We didn’t have any of the hundred-dollar antiaging products that teens are known to put on their as-yet-unblemished-by-adulthood skin, in hopes of staving off the fate to which we’re about to succumb: middle age.

There’s a part of us that wants to tell them: Aging is a privilege, and no amount of Drunk Elephant will stop it.

At Hollister, the throwback sweatsuits from the “2000s Vault” collection have the numerals “2001” on the rear — the year the authors of this story started sixth and 11th grade.

Ashley, striking the exact same pose in this denim Urban Outfitters miniskirt that she would have circa 2004.

In some ways, the younger generation is wearing these trends better than we did. We remember our suburban high schools to be oppressively conformist — so many students wearing the same Abercrombie polo shirts; the same low-rise, boot-cut American Eagle jeans; coveting the same logo Coach and Burberry bags; the same Uggs; the same, the same, the same. From our 25-years-older perch, it seems like teens today are more expressive and creative dressers.

A few of our teenage staples have gotten chic upgrades, too, beyond the aforementioned shorts under the miniskirts. We admired a denim bubble-hem dress at American Eagle with a basque waist — a far more interesting cut than the babydoll shape it would have taken in our day. And knit tops have shortened and widened to something more recognizably human-shaped, thank God.

We squinted uncertainly at sweatshirts with the real, licensed logos of sports franchises and universities splashed across them, unsure why this caused our ears to ring with cognitive dissonance, but then we realized: Every new collection from Hollister and American Eagle and Abercrombie & Fitch used to land like a dispatch from a mystical, ahistorical, endless faraway summer camp (or ski camp, or surf camp) for freckled and perfectly symmetrical 20-year-olds. The message was, “Frolicking out by the lake, too cool to be reached by phone and/or modernity. Pay us $129.99 to look like you might have also gotten invited.” At least these days, the brands acknowledge a present-day outside world, a shared reality with their shoppers.

The yin-yang earrings we saw at Lucky Brand? Well, those probably could have stayed in the previous millennium. Same for all things low-rise, especially low enough for a thong to peek out — we have heard rumors of the whale tail returning, and we refuse to acknowledge them. Putting words (or in this case, the numerals 2001) across our butts on sweatpants made us wistfully nostalgic for a simpler time, but was not an outfit we’d choose to repeat.

Can you even really say you went to the mall with a disposable camera if you don’t come back with a crookedly framed, wannabe-artsy atmospheric photo of the mall itself?

But capri pants? Bubble hems? Prairie skirts and rugby shirts? We greeted them again like old friends. Friendships evolve over decades, though, and sometimes they no longer fit. To be 40 going on 14 is to be haunted by the question: Can we pull these outfits off?

The answer, respectfully, is: Who gives an F. Approaching middle age dramatically — blessedly — reduces the amount of time one spends caring about what other people think. We only wish we hadn’t wasted so much time on it before.

Because here’s what happens when you look at yourself in a mirror at 40, wearing the clothes you wore at 14: You see two selves staring back at you. Of course, you see the silver-haired version who has gone up a few sizes, who worries less about what the popular girls and the cute boys will think. But you also see that 14-year-old-girl, and love that girl, and want to reassure her: It all turns out mostly okay. Go ahead, buy the miniskirt.