Can I start by saying how stoked I am that the 80's are finally out and the 90's have been 'in'? The 90's were about so many things for me. Let's see, I was shifting into the 90's in Junior High School. Boom. The ultimate age for absorbing everything and anything. Too much at times.
Obsessions, secrets, anonymous note passing, butterfly stomachs, day dreaming, crying, sneaking, yelling, lying, confessing, impressing, giggling, bonding, privacy... it was everything to be a teenager.
By the time movies like
Stealing Beauty,
Singles and
Reality Bites came out, I was a bright-eyed college student. I have friends who are stylists here in Paris who work with all the big guns, and when one of them came over to put together looks for a big feature, I told him he should just watch
Singles. He turned to me and said, "What's that?". Euros are so fashionable but the references are painfully familiar to genre's they know little about. Perhaps I should be a 90's fashion consultant out here.
I remember going to see R. Bites with my new dorm friends. We were way into Ethan Hawke and thought Ben Stiller was totally lame. Stealing Beauty was my all time fave movie back then. It moved me to a point where I dreamed of olive groves and wine soaked countryside parties. I also loved 90's films like Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures and John Duigan's Flirting. Simone and I traveled a lot while picking up new music abroad and we loved the then-new British pop movement - especially bands like Pulp, Blur, The Stone Roses, Suede and Verve. It was cool to mix all night dance marathon raves and Brit-pop. Dancing-dancing-dancing into feeling-feeling-feeling. I was caught in-between watching 90210 with dorm buddies and quitting the volleyball scene to becoming an artist, going off the popular grid, and immersing myself in pop-art, obscure foreign cinema and music. I wanted to get existential and shed the silver city pink lipstick and opalescent nail polish. I was basically a teenager from the Santa Barbara bubble with a hunger for big cities like San Francisco and London.
That said, it's been a little mindbendy to see what was so popular for me in real time in the actual year 1991, be so nouveau trendy today. The 16 year olds in Paris are wearing what the 16 year old me wore in the 90's. Wow. I guess the sensation I'm feeling is what my older sister must of felt when the 80's were back in full steam. It's my turn to feel the timewarp. Dang, I'm being reminded of my awkward years and how shy I was to hit the dancefloor. I'm hearing the very songs from my non-cell phone school dance world on the radio while Im working at home. Love it.
I'll never forget the moment Micheal J. Fox was in my hometown, Santa Barbara, on State st. promoting the use of grey water or some such environmental concept. I was really into Back to the Future. My brother took a photo of M J. Fox with us girls in the background. He made copies of it and sold it at school. I had an aqua net sprayed wave of bangs and wore a short sleeved cotton button up shirt, collar slighly up, with a loud floral print on it. My shirt was tucked into my peach cotton pleated cuffed shorts from the gap with a leather belt and a huge silver buckle on it. Oh yeah, and on my feet were my light toned top siders with no socks ( a splash of Euro in there for sure) and on my finger was a silver dolphin ring.
