Personal reflections on the icons, trends, and everyday relics that define generational memory and cultural identity.
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.
The Soundtrack of a Generation 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,…
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…