august: back to high school

monthly creative curations on a theme: seniors '93 vs seniors '25

Can you believe it’s already back-to-school time this month (well, for most of the U.S.)?!?! In just two weeks, my kid will be a high school senior! 🤯 This has me thinking a lot about my own high school experience and my senior year. From flannel to filters, from grunge to gadgets — I’m comparing high school senior life for the Class of 1993 vs. the Class of 2025. We GenXers are raising teens in a whole different world than the one in which we came of age, even if we’re all wearing Doc Martens.

These round-up style posts come out on the first day of every month, and they include my curations of music, art, fashion, beauty, and/or other areas of expression. The full content of the monthly posts (including a rad monthly Spotify playlist!) is accessible only to paid subscribers, but everyone gets a peek.

1. I’ve gotta start with the fashion — 90s styles are stilllll having a comeback! There have always been different teen aesthetics — preppy, boho, goth, punk, girlie, sporty, urban, etc., but the 90s trends are a thread running through all of these styles, and they’re going strong in our kids’ closets! The flannel shirts and high-waisted jeans I wore in high school are not much different than those my kid wears. Also the baggy jeans, cargo pants, overalls, skate sneakers, beanies, baseball caps, crop tops, choker necklaces, oversized blazers, floral and babydoll and slip dresses, platform shoes, oversized graphic tees, and round sunglasses are all having a revival moment! But somehow teens these days style themselves way cooler than I ever did…

   

   ahhh, high school in the 90s

2. During my teen years, I was very into magazines, which have pretty much been replaced by the internet/social media. If you asked me during my senior year about my career goals, I would have told you that I wanted to become the editor-in-chief of a women’s magazine — or a videographer for MTV. I read Seventeen, YM, Teen Beat, and even Cosmo to feed myself with the fashion and beauty expectations being placed upon me — and to counter that, I also read Ms., Bitch, and Bust magazines for my unapologetic feminist media. I created zines of my writing, photography, and art by going to Kinkos to photocopy them and staple them together. While zines still have a place in alternative teen culture, kids now consume media so very differently than we did! The internet is their magazine. TikTok is a major outlet where they get content, trends, and news. As for current, edgy fashion and culture magazines, Nylon and Fader deserve a mention here, even if I don’t personally know any teenagers who read them.

   

3. I didn’t get in trouble a lot in high school — not because I wasn’t doing things I wasn’t supposed to, but because I wasn’t getting caught…