Now that fashion revivals happen every two months, trapping us all in a continuous time loop of baggy-pantsed misunderstanding, slathered in Day-Glo and superfluous pockets, it shocks the conscience that any stylistic minutia is overlooked at all. In some cases the omission is a blessing. The year or so that urban hipsters wore cowboy hats and affected Southern accents was a season of hootenanny hell that need never be given another thought unless some ex-member of Nashville Pussy runs for high office. But there was ephemera that, if one is inclined (as we are) to look backward with nerd-tinted glasses, merits revisiting.

What was “moth culture,’’ and why does it matter? The first part of the question is easy. It was a late-’90s/earlyaughts trend, a smooshing together of “mod” and “goth,” employed by a microsection of post-punk/post-hardcore post-teens in hot spots of indie rock counterculture like New York City, Washington, D.C., and San Diego. Places where youth—disgruntled with the slovenliness of grunge and indie, too self-conscious to embrace either the faerie cosplay or S&M leather of goth, and too scrawny to pull off the varsity thuggishness of hardcore—looked instead to the cool Britannia of Britpop and the dissolute used-car salesmanship of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, and decided (either collectively or as individuals) that the look that best expressed the outof-time contrarianism of their respective/collective souls was “preppy vampire.” And, briefly, before the Strokes/ Libertines ushered in a ’70s rocker aesthetic aggressive in its heteronormative absence of glam, garage/dance punk revivals established the hoodie/suit-jacket combo as the height of “dressing up,” and Arctic Monkeys put the final nail in the tight-pants-and-filigree coffin by, in their 2007 single “Brianstorm,” offering up “top marks for not trying,” hundreds of, perhaps even a thousand, kids went mod + goth. Their beltwear was complex, their conservatism of dress was unsubtly transgressed with an unmistakable hint of kink, and all their haircuts were improbably black.