King’s Bunker, host of King’s College’s bohemian parties and Ents, recently witnessed a revival of corny late-millennial culture in a March event simply named ‘#SWAG’. Ten years after the initial surge of Tumblr, excessive hashtag use, and MTV, has the pressure in 2024 to have a Pinterest-worthy wardrobe and a perfectly curated Instagram feed strayed too far from our roots? Are the students enthusiastically donning their neon baseball caps and high-top converse at King’s infamously cool Ents scene doing so ironically, or just nostalgic for a childhood of no responsibilities and the cultural freedom to be cringe? A decade after the peak of this wave of internet culture, I interviewed some of the ‘kool kids’ to see how #swag they were in 2014. When asked to define ‘swag’, most of the people I spoke with struggled to come up with a concrete definition.
Instead, I received a list of items, with space buns, galaxy-tide tees, and iPod shuffle being some of the popular ones. These answers begged the question of whether this gauche stylistic and cultural period is genuinely part of our pre-teen memories, or rather a collective reimagination of Tumblr archives created by cooler older cousins. “[I had] minus-swag,” says Chloe Jacob, “Striped leggings and ballet pumps were what I was wearing in 2014.
” Stripes and pumps seemed to be some solid wardrobe staples in 2014. Also claiming to be “not swag at all back then,” Iz Dyson was rocking these with her sis.