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.
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…