About halfway through Mid90s, Jonah Hill’s film about Los Angeles skate culture in 1995, the group of five teenage boys at the centre of the plot head to a house party. On the bus on the way there, it’s pure adolescent activity: pills are popped, the desire for a car is discussed. Once at their destination, we find a perfectly pitched parents-aren’t-home house with a pine-panelled kitchen and frilled floral curtains: it’s the backdrop for questionable mixed drinks and packets of Cheetos. We meet a group of girls, and youthful hijinx ensues, including weed smoking, beer chugging and some eyebrow-raising underage sex. So far, so rites-of-passage indie movie.

Put the plot aside for a moment, though, and focus on the clothes. From the XXXXXXL trousers worn by the boys, to the cropped vests and dungarees on the girls, this is a madeleine of sartorial nostalgia for many who were teenagers in 1995, recreating a time Stüssy, Etnies and Airwalk were names whispered with reverence. Alternatively, it’s a happily received source of inspiration for twentysomethings deep diving into the style of a decade they are too young to remember. Either way, this is essential viewing for pointers on what summer 2019 style looks like.

Ryder McLaughlin as Fourth Grade, Na-kel Smith as Ray, Gio Galicia as Ruben, Sunny Suljic as Stevie and Olan Prenatt as Fuckshit in Mid90s. Photograph: Tobin Yelland/Altitude Films

The skate look, as seen in Mid90s, is now an established trope of fashion. The wider category of streetwear – hoodies, tracksuit trousers and trainers, as well as the graphic T-shirts and boards that define skate culture – has risen in profile and earnings in the past decade, moving from a niche to a style that more and more people wear, or are certainly aware of. According to the Business of Fashion, streetwear contributed 5% in sales of luxury personal goods in 2017, helping them to total more than £226bn. Brands that have roots in skate culture are key to this. Supreme, founded in 1994, was originally a skate shop, selling clothes and skateboard decks to the New York skate community. By 2017, the brand had collaborated with Louis Vuitton and received a rumoured 50% investment from the private equity firm the Carlyle Group. As the streetwear website Highsnobiety put it at the time: “It’s official: streetwear and luxury fashion are now the same thing.”

Lev Tanju, the founder of Palace Skateboards. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

Palace Skateboards, the British company founded in 2009 and entrenched in the skating scene around the Southbank Centre in London, attests to this; it collaborated with Ralph Lauren last year. Womenswear skate labels are the latest buzzy sector – with Aries, X Girl (first launched in the 90s) and Nikita the brands to Google, and even catwalk brands getting in on the look. Stella McCartney, House of Holland, Chloe and R13 all have looks that reference skate culture – baggy shapes, crop-tops, tie dye – for spring.

With the spotlight on skate culture brighter than ever, recalling this golden era of the look is always going to be a draw – especially when, as in Mid90s, it has authenticity, a quality that arguably attracts people to the culture in the first place. From the hoodies, battered sneakers and graphic tees of protagonist 13-year-old Stevie, to the character Fuckshit’s Cyprus Hill-ish beanies and oversized jeans, or the girls’ cropped tees and Mac Spice lipliner, it feels real, and very far from a fashion shoot. Hair is not glossy, makeup is a bit wonky and sneakers have seen better days. There’s no attempt to polish an era – and scene – that was proudly rough around the edges. It’s likely to join Larry Clark’s Kids in 1994, or 2001’s Dogtown and Z-Boys as a bona-fide skate-style reference.

“Jonah stressed to all the departments to stay away from what he called ‘nostalgia porn,’” says the film’s costume designer, Heidi Nivens. “Sometimes the way we remember a time isn’t what the reality was. That tends to happen a lot when we portray the 80s, way over the top. In actuality, it wasn’t that wild. Whenever we could use restraint, we did.”

Models wearing skate-inspired clothes from left: R13, Stella McCartney and House of Holland. Composite: Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for BFC

Perhaps the successful avoidance of nostalgia porn comes from Nivens’s firsthand experience of the skateboard scene in the mid-90s. “I have a great fondness for that era, you could even call it my golden era,” she says. Growing up in Virginia, Nivens moved to New York in 1994 and got a job working as action, sports and marketing editor for Paper magazine, a role that saw her travel to skate shows all over the country. She used this experience – as well as Big Brother and Thrasher magazines stored at her mother’s house – when working on the film, making sure only brands that were popular on the LA skate scene in 1995 were used, including Girl, Chocolate and the short-lived Menace. “We made a huge list and decided which character would wear which brand,” says Nivens. “At the time, the skate brand that someone would wear would really define who they were or what they were trying to communicate to the world. The detail has such nuanced reasoning. The film is really a sort of love letter to skateboarding and skateboarders.”

The appeal of skate culture has not gone unnoticed by those within retail. Selfridges has brought it instore as a way to attract millennial and Gen-Z customers. In October last year, the department store installed The Bowl, a skatebowl that sits in the Oxford Street window, with skaters encouraged to come along. The team is well aware that this demographic can sniff the inauthentic from miles away, hence collaborating with Brixton’s Baddest, the SW9-based skate shop on the rise.

“When we were working on the Designer Street room [where Selfridges sell high-end streetwear], we began to talk about the importance of community within the menswear market,” says buying manager Jack Cassidy. “The space is a permanent feature and we hope to become a destination for London’s skate community.”

The Bowl at Selfridges in London. Photograph: Rafal Wojnowski

Sofia Prantera is the founder of Aries and, in the 90s, the cult brand Silas which was sold at Slam City Skates. She pioneered skate clothes for women. She’s been a fixture in the London skate scene since the 90s and says her son is currently poring over her archive of skate magazines, making her reassess the era. “You look back at some things in a different way that you wouldn’t if you didn’t have those fresh eyes,” she says, adding this development is influencing her current designs. “When I started working at Slam my thing was trying to make small enough T-shirts that had the cool graphics,” she says. “You really wanted to wear the same as the men, only tiny, tiny, tiny, super-shrunken. It’s actually happening again at the moment, we’re making quite a few shrunken things.”

Nivens also has a theory that the rise of the 90s skate look has to do with something more tangible than nostalgia or a thirst for authenticity. “There wasn’t a lot of eccentricity in skate culture during that time,” she says. “Aaron Meza was a consultant on the film, like an OG filmer/photographer/skater. He told me a story about how he was managing skate teams at the time and they would take the teams on buying trips to get clothes at the Gap.” Like a version of Normcore? “For sure, 100% … As much as I love maximalism and excess, I think there is something refreshing when fashion circles back to that. It takes some of the pressure off somehow and it has so much to do with comfort.” Comfy clothes with a kind of blue chip youth culture cool? It’s no wonder the Mid90s look is back this summer.

•Mid90s is in cinemas from 12 April.