It’s happened, hasn’t it? Just as the prophecy foretold . Noughties nostalgia has grown into something bigger: a vibe shift. And slowly but surely the cultural pillars of the late 2010s/early 2020s are being knocked down (goodbye clean girl aesthetic and 5am club).
In their place? A new wave of grubbier, scenier pop culture reminiscent of the halcyon days of, er, Club NME. There’s an electroclash revival teetering into existence. There’s all those lyrics about doing keys and being a party girl on Brat .
The coolest pop stars have got really into smoking again. (See: Dua Lipa at Glastonbury and Rosalía..
. everywhere?) Gigi Hadid appeared in Heaven and Dilara Findikoglu’s latest campaign sporting eyeliner I last saw at a The Horrors gig. MySpace’s hippest photographer, the bloody Cobrasnake, is getting hit up to photograph the coolest parties once again.
And amidst all of this, what I’d call “Gen-Z Aesthetics TikTok” is beginning to mine the fashion archives for indie sleaze inspo and discovering some of the late-’00s’ greatest hits for the very first time. I hadn’t really thought about it before but – just as many Americans don’t realise that bronze, buff EDM Calvin Harris used to be pale, gangly electro Calvin Harris – there’s a real chance that anyone born after, say, 2008 might only know Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen as the impossibly chic designers of The Row rather than the grunge queens of New York: child stars turned NYU drop outs. And it is a delight to discover that youthful corners of the internet are stumbling upon such perfect cultural artefacts as the two of them at a flannel shirt-themed party with Nicole Richie or Mary-Kate pottering around uni with a Starbucks and a pastel green Balenciaga bag .
And what about the interview in which MK told W magazine she left university because “I need to be able to go to yoga and work out and just read scripts and go on auditions, because that’s what makes me happy. You know? Like, papers don’t really make me happy.” Fantastic.
So anti-girl boss! I’m so glad the youth are enjoying their own belated version of Olsen twin mania. Because it was a mania back in the day, wasn’t it? To say that those twins – who first became famous for appearing as tot Michelle Tanner in American sitcom Full House before making seminal teen movies like New York Minute – had millennials in a chokehold is an understatement. There was a period of my life when I’d do anything Mary-Kate told me to do.
In fact I have done many, many dumb things to emulate her over the years, including but not limited to: getting a family friend to import an “I heart NY” T-shirt for me from America and then immediately cutting it into bits in an act of “customisation”; not brushing my hair for weeks on end and then styling it by wearing a hairband horizontally across my forehead; and dressing in a way that I can only describe as “monk who is Coachella-curious”. Yes, both twins have classic, timeless style now, but no one did goth-scenester-boho-chic like them. They’re a large part of the reason why teenage girls across the UK spent Saturday nights from 2007-2009 rattling around small town clubs in biker booties.
And it’s definitely their fault that I spent my youth weighed down by layers and layers of increasingly tangled strings of beads, with a hairstyle that made me look like a milkmaid’s ghost. So, what can we learn from them, then, going into this new era of indie sleaze? Clearly, it’s important that your smock dress trails along the floor, no matter how dirty a city street you’re walking along; if you can’t fit your entire body inside your bag, leave it at home; and no side parting can ever be deep enough. But I’d also add a few more serious lessons, too.
It’s hard not to think about Mary-Kate and Ashley without recalling the horrors they dealt with as teens. (Of course, this was the Noughties, when girls couldn’t just have nice things like fame and good bone structure – they had to be punished for it.) They faced invasions of privacy (eg, Spencer Pratt bragging about selling videos of Mary-Kate drinking at a high-school party to the tabloids), and the lack of respect their journey into adulthood was treated with was and is shocking.
Along with Richie and Mischa Barton, the twins were regulars in tabloid columns about the “scary skinny” stars of the Size Zero era, which, in turn, fuelled “pro ana” blogs followed by girls desperate to learn how to shrink their bodies. (Even after Mary-Kate received eating disorder treatment for anorexia, she was still treated horrifically by the press.) Let’s maybe.
.. not do that again? I’d also suggest that, moving forward, perhaps we could avoid sexualising extremely young women.
(Hard, I know!) Take, for example, the way the twins’ 18th birthday was treated in 2004. You might have heard about websites counting down to them “becoming legal”, such as the Olsen Twin Jailbait Countdown Clock . Or the girls’ appearance on Saturday Night Live , when, during the closing credits, Mary-Kate joked, “Remember, we’re legal in four weeks!” Normal, normal stuff.
And the Olsen twins’ sexualisation as teens was in no way unique to them, by the way. Nearly every millennial woman I know has a dark story about partying, as a teenager, with much older male indie bands back in the day. I wonder if for indie sleaze 2.
0 we could skip the undertone of horrific misogyny? It feels like we can. Things do seem like they’ve progressed. I’ve not seen a countdown to a young female celebrity’s 18th birthday in at least 15 years.
And if we get a do-over of possibly the silliest era of pop culture – without its ugly side – that’s a real win. I’ll start digging around in the back of the wardrobe for my backcombing brush..
