When they give out the Tony Awards on Sunday, America's long cultural awards season finally comes to an end. Right?

Not quite.

Monday is the absolutely final awards ceremony of the season. That's when the fashion industry gives out its awards for design.

I am deeply ignorant of fashion design. As I told the Council of Fashion Designers of America when they asked me to write something about the 1990s for their annual awards program. But that didn't make them withdraw the invitation, so I found myself thinking hard -- harder than I ever expected to -- about the recent history of clothes.

I think it was around 1996 when the decade as a decade finally coalesced in fashion and style: bourgeois bohemianism, that funny oxymoron, became the 90s fashion design paradigm.

Bobos, as the writer David Brooks named them, are the ultimate baby boomers, insisting on having their cake and eating it -- as baby boomers always do. They want to be conformist non-conformists, renegade as well as respectable, enlightened but stylish. They want to stay forever young.

And so we saw the perpetual recycling of clothing styles from the 1960s and 70s during the 1990s. The return of beards. The disappearance of the necktie. The appearance of belly-exposing low waistlines -- a signifier of sexual laissez faire so universal that it's practically meaningless, just like miniskirts and bra-lessness were in the 60s and 70s. And tattoos and piercing were the 90's version of long hair -- freak flags intended mainly to upset parents and other squares.

The new good-taste ideal in style and in design generally in the 90s was very bobo -- ostentatious un-ostentatiousness, like the deluxe austerity of Prada clothes and SUVs, and the un-slick but hyper-stylish films of Europe's Dogma 95 movement.

All of which was fine by me, with the single exception of "casual Fridays." As far as I'm concerned, people in offices should wear sharp suits and ties, or jeans and Polartec, all the same or all different, whatever they or their bosses want. Let a hundred collars bloom.

But it's so lame to mandate one "casual" day a week - it's the fashion equivalent of the split-the-difference impulse that makes bad suburbs, places that are neither serene like the actual country nor bustling like a real city.

All the other 90s artifacts are still around, even ubiquitous…but I'm happy to report that the institution of Casual Fridays is already fading fast. No doubt to be resuscitated in about 2006 as a nostalgic running gag on a new sitcom -- That Nineties Show.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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