Today, of course, this has been proven to be a pipe dream. In the Nineties, Dr Ewen suggests many theorists imagined new technologies “would set us free and create a new utopian world where work would be automated and people would have more free time for relaxation and creativity”. Since the birth of teenage culture in the Fifties, “trends have emerged in popular culture, saturated the market, and then disappeared – only to reappear again years later.” Yet he also stresses that the Nineties have particular resonance: “First, it’s quite clearly the end point of one era (the offline era) and the starting point of a new era (the networked society), and second, it’s often considered as the last time the world wasn’t falling apart.” He doesn’t think this is particularly unusual, though. They were people in your class or at your work.” Rather than making people less connected and engaged, she suggests social media makes it easier to “really find or stay connected to your tribe”.ĭr Neil Ewen is a senior lecturer in communications at the University of Exeter, and has noticed that many of his students have started “wearing the same Nirvana T-shirts that I wore as a teenager back before Kurt Cobain died and grunge burnt out”. “You had to work hard to find kindred spirits and ended up hanging out with people who were not actually into the same things as you. “I decided that I would invite the first cool person I met at college to come with me.” Yet, while this might sound very cool to contemporary teenage ears, Del Drago says making connections was actually quite challenging. Reminiscing about cutting all her hair off and shapeshifting “from a grunge rock loving emo hippie to a raver cyberpunk,” Del Drago recalls buying two tickets to a rave at Brixton Academy. She characterises the era as “a time of making do and dreaming big”. There were huge problems in the Nineties that tend to be airbrushed from popular memoryĬreative consultant Giada del Drago was an art student at Central Saint Martins in the Nineties, and also remembers “a lot of daydreaming and a lack of technology”. The Independent’s Nick Hilton has already dubbed it “edgeless and unthreatening”, while another critic called it “a nostalgia turducken” – the Seventies nostalgia that launched the original show now layered within nostalgia for that show and for the era when it first aired, like a series of birds stuffed in bigger birds. Basement-dwelling, weed-smoking teens remain, but instead of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis adorned with bell bottoms and feathered hair, now the Point Place adolescents – and the kids of the original show’s leads – are donning checked shirts and backwards baseball caps, and drinking out of red Solo cups. That ’70s Show – the coming of age sitcom set in Seventies Wisconsin – is now That ’90s Show. This week, yet another show that was a cultural touchstone in the Nineties and early Noughties is “returning” to screens in spin-off form. But it’s nice to think about it that way.” As one TikTokker put it, “it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Three decades on, the cultural products that came to define the Nineties have taken on a new glow: the rosy hue of nostalgia. Dancing to Alice Deejay club mixes, they envisage a wonderful, remote age of “no social media,” “no meaningless distractions,” “just you and your friends talking for hours”. Across TikTok, young people born long after the millennium are creating videos imagining “being a teenager in the Nineties”. For today’s teenagers, nothing is cooler than the stuff that was cool 30 years ago.
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