I've Been To The Year 2000

Ribbons, American Girl movie, 2000s trends, shoegaze revival, Jelena truthers 🎀

Dec 21, 2023

Happy Winter Solstice and Capricorn season! And in the words of *NSYNC, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays! 🎄

In this issue:
🎀 Put a Bow on It (Literally)
🇺🇸 The American [Girl Doll] Dream
🌀 I’ve Been to the Year 2000
🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole

Next week will be the trends issue, including a post-mortem on my own 2023 predictions and share alllllll of the roundups about what defined pop/digital/internet culture in 2023. (We get into a little bit of it today.) I will even share some predictions for 2024. You can catch new Nicstalgia episodes the first week of the new year. Hope you are having a safe, happy, healthy season and thank you for reading/watching/listening for another year!!!!!! ❤️

🎀 Put a Bow on It (Literally)

Probably the most inescapable online discourse in 2023 was about girlhood: Tomato Girl summer, hot girl this and that, Barbiecore, Taylor Swift, calling everyone “girlies”, Girl dinner, etc. Rebecca Jennings’s “Girl” trends and the repackaging of womanhood is the most comprehensive piece behind this year’s biggest phenomenon:

“These supposed “girl trends” aren’t really trends at all. They’re marketing campaigns…What was once the province of marketing teams or journalists or magazine editors to christen cultural trends is now up to the public, and, it turns out, the public does a much more efficient job at this than the traditional gatekeepers ever could.”

If girlhood was the trend, the ribbon was the corresponding trend object. The Cut’s Woman In Retrograde aptly features a photo-illustration of a pink bow. I was inspired by Ruby's thread about the history of the ribbon (Sidebar: he was on Nicstalgia recently to chat about his new book, which is on its way to my mailbox as we speak!!!!!!) and wanted to share my thoughts on how the ribbon became to be the thing that represented girlhood across various aesthetics (abridged version originally posted on X here).

TikTok hyper-trends splat; there are too many, evolving too quickly. The trend cycle is hyper-accelerated (speed) and trend discourse is algorithmic across many aesthetics (velocity). This is my paintball theory; what was once a tiny little ball in the distance grows in speed and velocity. It looks larger and larger as it gets closer and closer, until it goes SPLAT!!!

We make sense of the proverbial mess left on the canvas by deriving trend objects (i.e. a ribbon) from compounded (multiple) and contextualized (meaningful) aesthetics.

'Ribboncore' is an aesthetic derivative of 4 categories:

If you haven’t been on Aesthetics Wiki, you’re in for an absolute treat. I had a blast making this visual because I’m always thinking about how fashion (more specifically in this case - aesthetics and trends) shapes identity and therefore consumer behavior. If you love this stuff too, please get in touch!!!!!! I’m looking to do more presenting and collaborative research-based projects in the new year.

🇺🇸 The American [Girl Doll] Dream

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Had so much fun chatting with Laura and Lindsey from the American Girl Women podcast. We talked about nowstalgia, examining the past through a contemporary lens, and taking on a critical viewpoint of culture. I LOVED AG, so it was super exciting to share my memories from the AG Fashion Show, the AG magazine (paper dolls, hippie- and Wizard of Oz-themed birthday parties, the pumpkin painting contest that we somehow did not win lolol), and the AG Penpal program. Shoutout to Julie, wherever you may be!

It was also really fun talking about my personality as a kid; it brought back a really great feeling. Can’t call it nostalgia per se, it’s a little more specific. It’s not a longing or a yearning for a pivotal moment in the past; it’s gratitude and contentment with the mundane day-to-day of life. It’s the feeling of unbridled imagination and pure joy when you’re playing – with dolls, climbing the tree in your front yard, or putting on a full-blown singing and dancing variety show for your family. I guess I can call it just being a kid.

Those dolls and their accessories are the only toys I still have from my childhood – they are also probably (or will hopefully become) my most valuable, financially-appreciated asset. I’m a Samantha 💅🏼 Listen to our conversation below and tell me which doll was your favorite!

The best AG links
• Move over, "Barbie" — Mattel announces plans for American Girl doll movie. ICYMI, American Girl has been owned by Mattel since 1998. Makes sense with the renewed interest in AG (nostalgia AND nowstalgia), they capitalize on this very emotionally resonant IP from their brand portfolio.
• The collector site AG Playthings is incredible and was very helpful in assisting me with organizing some miscellaneous accessories. It breaks down every product vertical, from Historicals to American Girl of Today. Also if you’re a dates nerd like me, it’s soooooo fascinating to reconcile the date of when a doll, outfit, etc. came out with your own memory.
• The Changnon Museum of Toys & Collectibles is a new virtual museum with two exhibitions: American Girl: 35 Years of Strong Characters and Childhood Nostalgia: A Collection of Pleasant Company and American Girl Catalogues. Warning!!! Serious nostalgia will be unlocked if you click these links!!!
• Through the museum, I found Girl AGain. It’s a resale boutique for American Girl dolls in White Plains, NY run by Yes She Can Inc., a non-profit helping young women with autism develop job skills. They are at capacity right now and will resume accepting donations in 2024.

🌀 I’ve Been to the Year 2000

Had a great time talking to my lovely friend Anna from Usurpator Mag about nostalgia, aesthetic revivals, the leopard print midi skirt, and how the internet hyper-accelerates the speed of trend cycles, among many other things:

Lana Del Rey 2012 Tumblr era
Groovival (obviously)
Trend forecasting democratization
Our New Aesthetic Reality
Being chronically online
My 1990 theory and paintball theory
Dupe culture and how having a fake Chanel cubic zirconia necklace was a rite of passage
Nymphet Alumni/fashion intellectualism
Hyperreality and Humean philosophy

If you understand the references from this pic below, it’s time for you to shut the computer, get off your phone, and go touch grass. Get some fresh air. Maybe take a walk. I say that lovingly. (And also to myself.)

I definitely go on too many tangents in the extended episode, but I really appreciate the opportunity to just sit down and talk about the things we’re always thinking about. The consistent theme of 2023 for me has been breaking out of my creative silo and collaborating/philosophizing/sharing with people who see the world through this culture-forward lens.

The central questions here are, How do you know “what’s trending?” How do you know “what’s popular?” How do you know when something’s “back”? It all comes down to how we share information with one another online and offline and the meaning we assign to these aesthetics, trends, and trend objects. Read our convo here or click on this extremely cute/gorgeous/beautiful pic:

🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole

This is all the random stuff I thought about this week based on recent pop culture events:
Apparently, TikTok Has Made Shoegaze Bigger Than Ever. Tbh I never even heard of the word ‘shoegaze’ until this year, and people of the Nicstalgia community were shocked that I, of all people, didn’t know this! I just don’t really listen to the genre; I actually discovered it through Spotify because I listen to 2010s dream pop. While shoegaze has been a legitimate subgenre, there’s actually there’s an interesting article about how Spotify makes up music genres. Anywho!!!!! I also discovered this year that Irish-English shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine is NOT in fact Welsh heavy metal band Bullet For My Valentine hahahahah.

Okay so Gypsy Rose Blanchard, whose life was the basis for the Hulu true crime drama series The Act, get out of prison soon. When I first heard the news, I thought, wait, hasn’t she been dead for 50 years? Turns out I was thinking of Gypsy Rose Lee, entertainer whose memoir was adapted into the stage musical Gypsy. Allegedly Blanchard wasn’t named after Lee, but it’s eerie that a mother – whose ultimate demise would be in retaliation for brutal Munchausen syndrome by proxy – named her daughter the same thing as an infamous, vicious ‘stage mom’. They both forged their respective Gypsy Rose’s birth certificates and controlled every aspect of their daughter’s life. I don’t like true crime as entertainment, but I’m bizarrely intrigued by the parallels through the lens of female generational trauma.

Okay, to end on a lighter note 😅 Benny Benassi, Italian DJ of “Satisfaction”, “Cinema”, and “Beautiful People” fame, is a different person than Benny Blanco, American music producer who is dating Selena Gomez. I recently explained to a friend who is not ~online~ in depth about the persistent Selena-Beiber shipping (“Jelena”) and Selena-Hailey rivalry. It was quite a journey LOL. Have to say though, that infamous “Call Me Maybe” video with Ashley Tisdale pulling Selena and Justin apart – one of the most 2012 videos in all of existence – still gets me every time.

Support Nicstalgia with a paid subscription for less than Samantha Parkington’s winter outfit: a sophisticated plaid cape, warming [shoe] gaiters, elegant hat, and a very fluffy muff.

Samantha Parkington | American Girl History

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