AND TODAY IN 90’S EDITORIAL GOODNESS, we bring you more 90s-pop-feminism-influenced fashion-androgyny by which I mean “Stella Tennant and then some nakie models with messy hair,” plus the last time that neon opaque blue and yellow lipstick was a thing!
Uh, you guys? Prom dance scene from She’s All That. This is SO major.
Teen movies are also one of those things that I know I should have problems with — smarty pants art girl needs a makeover to be attractive, only skinny white girls win, boyfriend is always ultimate goal, blahdyblah — but like, come on. If I have one guilty pleasure it’s honestly teen movies from the late 90s featuring Sassy Female Leads (can we talk about Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You and how along with, like, Daria she was probably Formative To My Teenage Identity?) and often based on like Some Classic Literature Or Something. I could sit on my couch and eat popcorn and Ben n Jerrys and watch those two and Romeo + Juliet and Can’t Hardly Wait and Empire Records and I mean anything with Parker Posey in it basically for days on end.
Can we also just take a look back at the goddamn cast of this movie? Anna Paquin, Kieran Culkin, Clea Duvall, Lil’ Kim, Usher? Somehow at the time I didn’t realize how epic that was.
I can’t get over the absolute goldmine that is Self Service’s new online archive — I think I saved half a dozen images from every issue posted to my hard drive and Pinterest today. I wish I could take all my damn outfit photos on a disposable camera, complete with date stamp and requisite lens-viewfinder parallax-induced decapitation due to double lens reflex. Also maybe I need to wear only one hoop earring and frosted lipstick at all times from here on out, yes? I swear that photo above just suddenly made me get the whole Chloe Sevigny thing for basically the first time ever.
Most of it just speaks for itself — more after the jump, but it’s totally worth dedicating an hour to browse the whole collection as well.
I don’t know about you guys, but in my head the entire world basically exists through a wide-angle or fisheye lens in a room with quirky wallpaper or maybe on some street corner/field/highway in LA/fire escape and then run through some super cross-processed high contrast or desaturated sepia filter. We have already noticed this little 24mm addiction problem I have, yes? There also are a lot of ball-chain necklaces and girls with short hair in baseball teeshirts and/or slipdresses and boots, also brooding men often wearing nail polish.
Possibly there is something wrong with me, or maybe it was just that (despite my parents’ valiant efforts to the contrary!) I was exposed to an excess of these mid-to-late-90s music videos during my formative years? Either way, bonus points for every last one of them here that you can identify.
Also, someone needs to explain to me why I haven’t been hit over the head with an excess of fashion editorials styled, coloured, and edited like this yet? I’m over all this Avedon-revival and Slimane-clone clean B+W portraits thing, bring me back some Yelena Yemchuk and Juergen Teller and early Steven Klein colours and angles, please.
Oh just a lil’ bit of WEEKEND WEAR, you guys. Like those things you put together and are like GODDAMNIT I FEEL SO COOL IN THIS but most of the time you have, you know, Social Constraints Of Adulthood And A Real Job Where “But I’m Arty” Isn’t Enough Of An Excuse For It To Be Okay Especially Because You Are In Your Mid-Twenties Now? (I think my inspiration is pretty obvious.) Thankfully there’s Friday and Saturday nights though, which totally permit for things like “crop tops” and my rapidly growing terrifying/embarrassing/awesome collection of various and sundry clip-in-hair extensions. So even if I’m wearing a knee-length linen dress, oxfords, and a blazer right now — we all know what I’d be up to given the chance.
Unfortunately, the availability of Pop-Up Videos (or more accurately, the heartbreaking lack thereof) on the internet at this point is intensely disappointing. I remember them with such astounding clarity! Brandy and Monica “The Boy Is Mine!” The slit in Monica’s skirt at around 2:45 was added by a stylist to compete with Brandy’s sexed-up outfit there! I remember this thirteen years later! How! Why is this not on the internet! WHY?! And that whole episode of Sabrina, The Teenage Witch where they imitated it? AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO REMEMBERS THIS.
In the meantime, another present from the rusty mid-90’s archives of Viacom networks back before Jersey Shore was, like, a thing — in case you were not yet aware of it, the entirely of Undressed can be watched online. Like for free. Yes. Don’t pretend like you didn’t watch it and change the channel frantically the second your parents walked in the room (perhaps you, too, had something innocuous, like a nature show, or golf, stored in the memory button on the remote for fast switching?), because we all know you did. And, wait — Is that Adam Brody? Katee Sackhoff? Christina Hendricks? Yes, yes it is.
PS: Five bucks (or at least my unwavering gratitude for the rest of eternity) if you can dig up the pop-up version of that Brandy/Monica video for me. Seriously.
So I had a junior-high-school-dance/apocalypse-themed birthday party (are those two things really that far off in reality anyhow? sure felt like judgement day at the time) and made everyone sit for yearbook photos. Here’s the half of them I finished editing, and expect to see my totally epic/hideous outfit (there was blue lipstick, a pink hair extension, and a high-waisted green silk maxi skirt worn with a crop top, which we’ve seen before involved) in another post soon. For now you can look at all these lovely people grimacing in front of a laser background with lots of clips, Betsey Johnson temp tats, and scrunchies, after the jump, or find other people’s photos of the rest of the night over at Top 8, duh.
Maybe I’m turning into a broken record here — this will, after all, be the second time I post overly enthusiastic posts about editorials by now-iconic photographers from Arena Homme in the 90’s, and it seems like every other post on this blog is now dominated by a crippling nostalgia for the decade of my youth — but like, kids, SERIOUSLY. Potentially questionable racial politics in some of the images aside, these are all pretty epic, especially those amazing cheesy effects on the Roversi ed. More, of course, after the jump — all images from Arena Homme FW1996, via the TFS fourms.
Sometimes going home to New Jersey for holidays leads to really, really fortuitous coincidences — like coming across the skirt you wore to your goddamned eighth grade dance in, like, 1998 in the attic. HOW EPIC IS THIS THING?
The shiny green crop tube top thing we’ve seen before and I wear pretty regularly, but was originally purchased as the strapless bra to go with the weird sheer black corset thing I wore this with…. so happy to have them FINALLY REUNITED AT LAST with the addition of this oversize crop lace shirt, a choker (also from junior high school), my beloved combat boots, and an unnecessarily high Larissa-Oleynik-style-ponytail. Oh, and frosted lipstick. And blue nails. I only wish I had photos of how damn awkward I looked the last time I wore this. I seriously basically feel like an extra in that awful choreographed Fatboy Slim prom dance scene in She’s All That or whatever crap they had Shannyn Sossamon wearing in that knight movie with Heath Ledger even though I think that actually came out post-Y2K but shh, we can pretend.
I’m turning twenty-five in a few weeks and it’s definitely going to be a re-do of my 13th birthday / junior high school dances so that I can wear this again — this time around sans baby fat, acne, braces, and glasses, and with my ever-so-scandalous-midriff totally exposed. And anyone who wants to donate butterfly clips or a mini backpack — I’m in the market. Lisa Frank temp tats and Lip Smackers also OK.
Um, no commentary needed on this post other than EPIC WIN FOREVER and why did I ever throw out everything I owned in the fourth grade because I would wear it all right now always forever and ever NO SERIOUSLY she almost makes me want FLORALS in my life.
It’s no secret that The Fifth Element has long been one of my favorite movies. (actually, in general, an aside about how I’ve always kind of been way into Luc Besson’s girls though I Have Some Cognitive Dissonance about the whole like fragile-tortured-asskicking-childlike-animallike-babe thing? ANYHOO. Clothes!)
But re-watching it last night drove home one reminder pretty hard: holy shit, those Gaultier costumes were brilliant. Aside from the obvious — Milla Jovovich in orange crotch-suspenders, Gary Oldman’s plastic-covered undercut and pinstripe coat — the over 900 costumes on everyone else in the movie do so much to create the feel of the film that’s made it so visually memorable for over a decade.
I mean, seriously. In retrospect also, there’s something so quintessentially mid-90’s about all of it too, as if Gaultier embodies something about the 90’s in the same way Balenciaga and Hedi Slimane’s Dior Homme seem to represent pop culture in 2000-2010. Looking back over his collections from the late 80’s to the mid 90’s — the cone bras, the kilts, the corsetry, the deconstruction, the lurid colours, long skirts, “tribal” and “medieval” influences — there’s an inevitable sense of playful, cheeky irreverence about it all that I can’t get enough of. Gaultier’s set for a massive retrospective, starting out at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts this coming June before traveling to Dallas and San Francisco (and fingers crossed for New York!)
JPG SS94
FW 89/90
SS 94
As a side note — if anyone knows of a good resource for digging up runway images pre-2000, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME KNOW. It’s practically impossible, which is pretty disappointing. Most of these images are from the SS07 30-year retrospective collection, which kind of doesn’t count. Alas!
Much more from The Fifth Element and classic Gaultier, after the jump.
Half-bleached undercut, layered studded bracelets, excessive hardware jewelry, man-skirts (or are those just uber-wide pants?), leather jackets, teen angst, chipped black nail polish… had you any doubt at all that the 90’s are back full force and that now, AT LONG LAST, I get to joyfully re-live all the glorious sartorial errors of junior high school minus the whole social pariah thing — despite how contemporary and fresh it looks, this editorial is actually from Arena Homme’s FW 1999 issue. I REST MY CASE.
AND ALSO, an ed from a 1996 issue, by Steven Klein (who directed Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” video, had you forgotten.) If there’s one thing I miss in today’s uber-slick fast’n’fancy easily retouched digital era of fashion photography, it’s that soft focus, off-kilter white balance, heavy grain, and incredible depth of field that you still can only get so perfectly with film. I’m not even a huge fan of Klein but I love these shots — simple, clean composition, remarkably simplistic styling (HEINOUSLY PRINTED SKIN-TIGHT POLYESTER BUTTON DOWN SHIRTS O YES) but full of texture and colour.
