Before smartphones, we collected things — stickers, friendship pins, Care Bears, and Cabbage Patch Kids. Take a trip back to the mid-’80s, when school supplies were status symbols and Saturday morning cartoons ruled the weekend.
In the mid-’90s teens turned thrift stores into treasure hunts, and bell-bottoms, vintage jackets and flannel became DIY 1990s thrift shopping statements.
Making mixtapes in the ’90s was an art form. Today, we’ve traded cassettes for streaming apps, but the rules of how to make a 1990s playlist remain.
Some stories are too timeless to stay on the page. Every generation finds its own version of Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, or Lord of the Flies, and each retelling tends to reflect the world it’s born into.
If you were a teen in the ’90s, summer didn’t smell like sunscreen, it smelled like dust, fast food, and freshly printed concert T-shirts. Festivals like H.O.R.D.E., HFStival, Lollapalooza, and every Dave Matthews Band show within driving distance were rites of passage for a generation that measured time by mixtapes, not timelines.
Before BookTok or e-readers, there were backpacks stuffed with paperbacks, traded, borrowed, and loved until the spines cracked.
Between 1992 and 1995, I spent more weekends than I can count folding tiny T-shirts at GapKids in Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, Maryland. It wasn’t glamorous, but working at the mall was its own rite of passage: equal parts paycheck, hangout spot, and backstage pass to the social hub of the ’90s. The Mall as…