The Death of the Nineties Girl: A Reflective Essay.

I have recently been feeling prompted to write a piece for the blog that is more academic and reflective, less conversational than what I usually post. I am aware that this is a very niche topic, but it was something that captured my attention and prompted new creativity. This blog continues to be a place where I am reminded of how much more there is still to learn through the art of writing.

If you’re above the age of 30, live under a rock, or (very wisely) don’t have social media, let me describe to you who the “clean girl” is in case you’ve never met her.

She wakes up at 7am and, after completing her 10-step skincare routine that ends with Rhode eye patches and some kind of serum leaving her skin glowing, she slicks her hair back into a ponytail with a wax stick and a headband. Why we’ve decided that a founding father ponytail glued together with wax is cute, I’m not sure. I’m certain that we will look back in 15 years and wonder why hair damage was trendy. But I digress.

After slicking her hair, eating a slice of avocado toast on homemade sourdough accompanied by her morning greens powder swirled into a glass of water, and changing into her matching workout set from Aritzia, Clean Girl hops in her car and drives to pilates. She orders a smoothie at the coffee shop next door, and later her oat milk vanilla latte or matcha. She doesn’t buy products that don’t have cute packaging (the ones with good branding are more trustworthy, right?), or anything that hasn’t been linked to her favorite influencer’s LTK. She doesn’t like grocery stores that don’t carry her favorite health foods (that are actually just so hyper-processed and full of fillers and junk but shhhh, don’t tell her that). She doesn’t like politics, too divisive. She’d prefer to get her news from TikTok after all the relevant political people have broken it down into the actually important pieces. She drinks probiotic soda, specifically the one that just launched as a collab with that one California influencer. She doesn’t eat gluten, or dairy, or anything that doesn’t have ‘protein’ listed on the label. Not because she has an allergy to any of these ingredients, but because her favorite fitness influencer told her that they don’t have sustainable macros and she needs to eat her bodyweight in protein every day. Clean Girl walks 10k steps a day. She loves Gracie Abrams, Sabrina Carpenter, and avidly watches reality television, but only at night after she’s changed into her matching pajama set and put on her red light therapy mask. Specifically, she watches Secret Lives (iykyk). She would give anything to go to her favorite influencer’s pop-up event in LA, and has been patiently waiting for Parke to restock their signature sweatshirt. Clean Girl loves to post on her Instagram, and would DIE if she could someday reach a following of 15k.

Okay. That was a lot of stereotypes, I know. But this is the essence of the modern girl. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Her. Why is She so desirable? Why does everyone seem to want to be Her? I’m not going to pretend like I don’t; becoming Her has taken up way too much of my mental energy and spent too much of my money the last few years. I think that one of the greatest contributing factors to my discontentment is that She exists. She’s who everyone my age wants to become. But She’s starting to irritate me. All She lives for is relevancy. She buys fast fashion. She experiences everything through her phone. She is so basic, yet thinks She’s the trendiest girl in Her circle. She’s seeped Her way into high schools and friend groups and first dates and family holidays. She’s everywhere.

I’ve fallen victim to wanting to be Her. And maybe it’s the fact that I’ve grown up in the digital age, or maybe it’s because I’ve let myself fall prey to consumerism. Regardless, I’ve come to the conclusion that I do not want to become Clean Girl. That, I’ve realized, is the blandest existence in the world.

I’ve recently become captivated by the culture of the nineties. (And now, all of my older family members reading this are rolling their eyes and smirking.) Oh, the nineties. A simpler time. Filled with its own beauty standards and societal norms, certainly. But simpler, in my Gen-Z opinion. I think one of the strongest observable differences in nineties culture was that although technology had existed for some time and was still directly connected to pop culture, social media didn’t exist to instantaneously amplify the voices. You didn’t get the satisfaction of seeing Oscar-winning red carpet looks on social media minutes after they walked the carpet. You had to wait until the magazines published them. In some regard, people still very much had their own opinion separate from the media. And what I’ve come to be aware of is this: everyone now seems to want to go back.

The fashion trends are swinging in that direction. The other day, I bought a French pin from my local grocery store because I was tired of using my claw clips. The French pin is chic. She’s effortless. She’s mature. Except the ironic thing is that claw clips were the original trend in the nineties, only then they were called banana clips. Somehow they made their way back to the fashion scene during my middle and high school years, and now everyone who’s grown tired of how trendy they’ve become are going back to an even older hair trend. But there is something captivating about a girl who uses a French pin. She swirls her wavy hair up into a tightly wrapped spiral, and secures it with a little metal pin that somehow, magically, holds everything together with the perfect amount of messiness. I still haven’t mastered it.

Converse? Never heard of her. I recently bought a pair of white Nike’s with silver accents and a black-outlined swoosh because they looked ‘vintage’. Like something Princess Diana would have worn with black bike shorts and a crewneck, in her rebellious Diana way. Ironically enough, they’re the kind of sneakers I would have gagged at getting for back-to-school in 8th grade. The middle school girl who only wanted to wear neutrals and Vans with her “mom jeans” would have a meltdown seeing my outfit today as I write this; a vibrant, purple-blue crewneck and black bike shorts with new, dad-looking Nike’s and my French pin updo. Channeling my Diana.

For years, I’ve heard about Sleepless in Seattle. You’ve Got Mail. Only recently, did I watch these movies and understand the attraction, the nostalgia. I watched Meg Ryan live her perfectly simple New York life, falling in love with how she talked and what she wore, and the way she answered the phone and listened to talk shows on the radio in her robe. Her blonde pixie, her shameless love of Austen, and her aversion to Hanks’ corporate bookstore. She was so girl, yet looked nothing like Clean Girl.

What is it about the nineties that I love so much? I think it’s a lot of things.

The pace of life. The way people weren’t obsessed with their calendar, glued to their phones. Writing letters, for goodness sake.

The music. Artists like Prince and Celine Dion and MJ and Whitney Houston, who wrote songs with original sounds and standout lyrics that now everyone’s trying to replicate or become as iconic as.

The way people dated. The respect, the pursuit, the clarity. Watching nineties rom-coms reminds me that even in a movie where romance is idealized, there was a time where text games, social media rules, and hard launching wasn’t a thing.

The simplicity of watching a movie in the theater, butter popcorn and all, not waiting until you could stream it on Apple TV.

Buying things with cash.

A newspaper box on the street. I watched Dumb and Dumber with my host family last night and we realized amidst the horrendous stupidity of the movie that newspaper boxes are a thing of the past.

Watching TV at home with a VCR and cable channels.

Holidays where people bought gifts because they knew you’d love them, not from an online gift guide with links.

Talking to someone on a phone connected to the wall, without 24/7 access and internet presence.

Girls who wore dresses and every day clothes that made them feel pretty, not just something post-worthy. Effortless, before effortless became a trend.

I’m realizing more and more every day that what I crave is originality. Certainly, the nineties had its flaws like every era of human history does. But in a culture obsessed with progress and trends, the nineties feels refreshing. I am so exhausted by the fit-the-mold life that every influencer posts. They’re all just one big clump of similarity, with just enough differences to distinguish them from the others. And even though there are certain current trends that I find attractive, and many positive aspects to prioritizing health and wellness (especially as someone with an autoimmune disease), I just find it completely boring and bland to keep living like the Clean Girl is the highest aspiration of modern femininity. I find myself yearning for life without noise, yet I completely contradict that philosophy by immediately opening Instagram in the morning after checking my sleep score. I am flooded by an algorithm that desires for me to look just like the next girl. I look in my closet and I’m bored because I’ve bought all the pieces that someone else my age would like, but nothing like what I’d actually wear.

Why is it that I read a novel by an author none of my friends know and feel like I’ve stumbled upon secret treasure?

Why am I so captivated by the simplicity of an old, red-bricked Kentucky neighborhood, homes with tall white pillars and front porch swings? The new host home I just moved into has brown oak cabinets and floors that feel like my grandparent’s home. The floors creak, and there’s a tall brick fireplace and floor-to-ceiling wood shelves on the wall opposite my bed. Nothing like the spotless, modern mansion of my first host home from a few weeks ago, with the king-size bed and glass-walled shower. Most of us are making our homes whiter, painting the walls neutral and picking countertops to match. But a home with character, with creaky floor boards and a single vanity closet, with deep colorful accents and painted art on the walls, this home feels nostalgic of a simpler time.

The more I grow up in a time that creates cleaner lines and whiter walls and blockier cars and trendier trends, the more I crave a time where people picked things simply because they liked them.

What has finally clicked in my mind is this: in order for me to not drown in the ocean that is social media world, I must choose to live like I’m from a different time. Originality, by definition, means choosing the thing that is not the norm. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be original. And what feels real, what feels full of life and meaning and character, is the thing that I choose because I genuinely love it. Not because Clean Girl told me to love it. The things that I love are becoming more rare. Literature. History. Drama, and not in the form of a reality show. Art found in the architecture of a building, or choreography, or a documentary. Reading, and not on a Kindle but going to Barnes and Nobles and spending $20 on the physical copy of a book. Cooking from a cook book or written recipe and realizing that it’s one hundred times better because you don’t have to endlessly scroll past the blogger’s life story before reaching the recipe, or constantly exit out of unwanted pop-up ads. Listening to music that sounds older, is older, in the car because it actually feels less stressful than the music my generation listens to. Choosing things that feel worth choosing, instead of the thing everyone else likes.

Last weekend, I found myself at a church event supervising a meal packing table with elderly adults. These people attended a nearby Southeast campus that is known for its simple worship and less-modern programming. “Chapel in the Woods” might be known as the elderly campus, but it’s full of life. In the two hours I spent with these people, I found myself smiling harder than I had in a while and maintaining conversation at a rate that felt slightly unnatural. Cathy, Judy, and Mary were dazzling. They had so many questions for me about my life; a genuine interest in who I was. The tables of millennials and young people I worked with later in the day were mostly silent; they didn’t make much conversation. The “girls” had a way of teasing me and phrasing things that was so unique. While in a conversation where they attempted to set me up with a younger guy they knew, they asked me, and I quote, “Is there anything you could find desirable about him?” I found that such a funny way of asking if I liked him. In between conversations, I found myself wondering what these women were like at my age, and how much I would have loved to be their friend. They grew up in such a different time. I like to think we would have been good friends. I think we would have watched Audrey Hepburn movies at the cinema and gone shopping and had shakes at the local diner and read books at the park together.

The blandest existence in the world is one where you live like everyone else tells you to. But the richest life is the one that chooses to live confidently different than the norm, because it’s from originality that we experience beautiful, meaningful things.

Nineties Girl may not be as attractive to the world as Clean Girl, but Nineties Girl sure has a lot more going for her.