Some People Wait a Lifetime for a Moment Like This
Bangerz, Sephora Dysmorphia, Corpse Paint, the new Room Raiders, Xanga roleplaying ☢️
What a fun week! Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this – ‘this’ meaning being a Kelly Clarkson Show audience member. You can’t take pictures of anything inside, but it was very cool seeing American Idol winner/From Justin to Kelly star/extremely talented and sweet human Kelly Clarkson in person. The episode airs today! I didn’t see Jimmy Fallon or Ramy Youssef (who was hosting SNL that night) while I was in 30 Rock, but I did see them both out in the wild on Tuesday! Other notable birthday activities:
Went out to brunch and watched Heat Lightning (1934) on the bar TV. The dialogue of a 90-year-old movie is especially entertaining when it’s one that’s pre-code, aka. from before censorship guidelines were enforced for motion pictures.
Saw the Macy’s Flower Show, visited the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and saw a nostalgic photography exhibit at The Met. (I share more about them below!)
Visited a thrift store where I saw not one, not two, but THREE pairs of Limited Too jeans. Iconique!
Did the “Oops!…I Did It Again” choreography that I’ve been practicing since I was 10 years old at karaoke. People also sang “22” and “23” in a row. 1990 Theory!
In this issue:
👅 The absolutely stunning exhibit by the artist who designed the giant tongue slide for Miley’s Bangerz Tour
💄 Sephora Dysmorphia with Nymphet Alumni x Jess DeFino: beauty politics and food as subcultural identities
🖤 Can nostalgia ever actually be original? Here’s why the el.f. x Liquid Death Corpse Paint had a cultural moment
☢️ Parallels between Room Raiders and Boy Room and the appeal of domestic squalor as entertainment
📲 Xanga roleplaying, boat shoes are like cicadas, Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, Miss Dior installation, the $5K Louis Vuitton fragrance book you can get me for my belated bday, Steve from Blue’s Clues’ greatest lesson
ICYMI, last week’s issue primarily focused on Avril Lavigne’s obsession with Birkin bags and featured very unhinged full concerts from Fergie and Lady Gaga, lots of nostalgic mall scents, and my 1990 Theory.
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Huge thank you to Nicstalgia supporters who I will love forever: Janine, Marie, Liv, Mitra, and CY! 💐💐💐
👅 It’s our party, we can do what we want to
I saw an IG post of Miley on the Bangerz Tour the other day where she came onto the stage by sliding down the tongue of a gigantic Miley head. Coincidentally, I recently went to the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and there is an exhibit featuring mind blowing work from Es Devlin. She’s the English artist and stage designer who created this concept!
Devlin has made large scale touring stage sculptures in collaboration with Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Kanye, Adele, U2, The Weeknd, Lorde, Pet Shop Boys, Katy Perry, and more. Her work on the 2022 Super Bowl Halftime show featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar won 3 Emmy awards. A small model of it is displayed in the exhibit, and it’s so crazy to think how it scaled into a (comparatively) larger-than-life stage setup. Her massive contribution to pop culture experience aesthetics was only ONE aspect of her work I was completely moved by; her body of work extends far beyond this specific focus. I was beyond impressed!!!!!
“An Atlas of Es Devlin is renowned for work that transforms audiences. Since beginning in small theaters in 1995, she has charted a course from kinetic stage designs at the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera to installations at major institutions, including the World Expo, Lincoln Center, and the United Nations headquarters. Her sculptures for Olympic Ceremonies, NFL Super Bowl halftime shows, and stadium tours for The Weeknd and U2 frame narratives that feel personal at a monumental scale. Over the past decade, she has adapted her craft to address climate and civilizational crises. Her public installations on endangered species and languages have inspired audiences to reimagine their connections to each other and to the planet. She shapes stories in ways that stay with us and reframe our thinking.”
💄 Do we all have Sephora dysmorphia?
The crossover episode we’ve all been waiting for!!!! I’ve been a religious reader of
since Madonna's Face Is Not Subversive and a devoted listener of Nymphet Alumni since a friend told me that what they talk about on their show is what’s going through my brain 99% of the time. (Which I can now confirm is true. Desperately need both JD & NA on Nicstalgia btw!!!!)I talked about Sephora tweens a couple months ago, but the discourse – both about Sephora/Drunk Elephant specifically and girlhood on a macro level – is superficial, literally and figuratively. As I’ve been researching aesthetic labor over the past year, I’ve seen how beauty politics run so much deeper than this discourse ever allows. I knew I could count on this group to really dive in!
Taking my intelligible Notes app notes and paraphrasing thought-starters and takeaways from this must-listen episode:
The group talks about the “moral imperative of beauty”, which I’ve viewed in the past through the lens of aesthetic labor, aestheticized work, and the pseudo-religious ideology that adjacency to ‘beauty’ correlates with acceptance, belonging, and ‘goodness’.
In basic terms: our society thinks pretty = good and ugly = bad. If your job is in an industry like fashion or beauty, a condition of your employment is to be ‘pretty’ and sell your product to achieve the ever-coveted feeling of others’ acceptance and belonging.
My mind was kinda blown when they said the expectation now is for companies to be humans and for humans to be companies. (I talk more about this below with the Liquid Death x e.l.f. campaign specifically.)
Bath & Body Works has sustained its relevance so well to the point where every generation associates Bath & Body Works with their respective coming-of-age decade – Gen X with the 90s, Millennials with the 00s, and Gen Z with the 2010s.
We’ve strayed too far from God’s light: Dessert, Jessica Simpson’s edible beauty line!!!! (Jk. This line was discontinued because she got sued so many times for people’s adverse physical reactions to the product. The stories are wild.) Very very interesting mention of “diet culture-adjacent beauty products”, where people crave confectionary-flavored beauty products yet literally inject themselves with Ozempic so they don’t have to eat any actual food.
The group talks about how food-inspired makeup trends are insane (i.e. latte makeup, blueberry-glazed nails). We used to have goths, e-girls, etc. and now we have strawberry girls. Is that really based in self-expression or meaningful connection? “What does it say about us?”
I think a lot about manufactured subcultures and how being a member of a subculture of yesteryear required a level of political activism and commitment to a particular lifestyle. Now, identities are cosplayed online, interchangeable at any time. Trends have gone splat (Paintball Theory™!) and aesthetics converge and diverge at a dizzying pace. (See my Ribboncore Aesthetic Derivatives chart.) The cherry picking has gotten out of control. No food pun intended, sorry!!!!!
🖤 Can nostalgia ever actually be original?
The el.f. x Liquid Death collab sold out immediately when it launched. I thought the campaign was cute – Corpse Paint is a coffin-shaped palette consisting of black and white makeup. The promotional video was set in a girl’s bedroom and set to cheesy music, reminiscent of 80s/90s girlie toy commercials.
Why was this campaign so well-received?
After 2023, the year of The Barbie, people have Barbie fatigue. The movie was marketed absolutely relentlessly – insufferably, perhaps. Seeing a subversive take on Barbie feels fresh and different after the entire world turned pink last year.
That being said, I do think the personification of corporations on social media is very off-putting in most cases. It’s a really weird norm now for commenters to say, “The marketing team needs a raise!” It feels like someone is pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. It’s literally the marketing team’s job to release campaigns. I’m not saying not to give kudos to people who did an awesome job – working in marketing or social media is more high-pressure than ever. The real issue at hand is that people are so insanely cruel to one another on the internet, yet there is a pathological need to humanize corporations that are literally just trying to sell us stuff and absolutely nothing more.
Is Corpse Paint ripping off Black Metal Barbie?
Not all commenters shared the same enthusiasm for the campaign – some noted the striking similarities between Corpse Paint and Black Metal Barbie by artist Gwenmarie White (2017). The concept was absolutely very similar, I mean almost copy-paste. Same girlie music and subversive, satirical format. Was it possible that someone from e.l.f., who presumably has an enormous marketing budget, was familiar with this video and ripped it off?? Absolutely.
However, in contrast to fast fashion corporations copying indie designers’ work, is playing off nostalgic concepts just remix culture? White could never sue e.l.f. for ripping off Black Metal Barbie; in fact, it’d be more likely for the VERY well-resourced Mattel to pursue litigation against White for putting their dolls in a blasphemous, literally satanic context. I’m not a lawyer (what, like it’s hard?), but I presume the real legal danger would be if Black Metal Barbie products were sold, because Barbie is intellectual property (IP) owned by Mattel. They are NOT afraid to sue people lol.
I suppose the question isn’t about the technicalities of satire, parody, homage, fair use, or IP/copyright infringement. It’s more about intention and whether it actually matters. Here, we have two fighters: e.l.f., the corporation, selling a product, and Gwenmarie White, an artist, playing into subversive, absurdist themes in the name of creative expression. In late stage capitalism, will commerce always win the battle of commerce vs. art?
Is Corpse Paint appropriating the black metal subculture?
Corpse paint is not a name that was come up with by e.l.f. It’s a type of body painting that is primarily associated with the black metal bands, shock rock artists, and even pro wrestlers. This subculture is not primarily rooted within or based upon a marginalized identity or community group, and people who buy Corpse Paint are going to apply it like they do their regular makeup. They’re not applying it to emulate a demonic clown or decaying corpse. As much as I could understand how people from the black metal subculture would be annoyed that normies are exploiting them for profit, counter culture can only exist as well…a counter to the culture. A position opposite, contradicting, or in defiance of the mainstream can only exist in relation to the mainstream itself.
Can nostalgia ever really be original?
Absolutely. While nostalgia cannot exist without being connected to a previous time, each cultural zeitgeist is defined by ALL of the sociocultural standards, norms, and conventions of the time. Like when we look back at the 2000s, maybe that took fashion inspiration from the 80s, but life and society were totally different. You could never mistake the 2000s for being the 1980s, even if certain elements are nostalgic, borrowed from, or inspired by it. (This is what I call Trend Composition, aka. the Olive Green Utilitarian Jacket Theory™ in practice!) It’s like a kaleidoscope. All the pieces are there – fashion, art, music, media, technology, politics – but they shift to make completely unique formations as time marches on.
☢️ Room Raiders walked so Boy Room could run
Social media savant Adam Faze recently launched Gymnasium (née Fazeworld), a television studio for the age of TikTok. I liked their retro style promo video set in a high school gymnasium. They even mention “our scouts are always on the hunt for the next class of stars – even late bloomers!” which I think means that I should host a show for them, even though I’m a Millennial. I have so many ideas!!!!!
Gymnasium’s latest and greatest show is called Boy Room. People are saying it’s like MTV’s Cribs, which is categorically false. It is the 2020s answer to MTV’s Room Raiders: they go into boys’ super shitty NYC apartments and show you how disgusting they are. I personally don’t like the premise of this, because if anything, men need examples of how to NOT be a scumbag and women need to NOT sleep with 28-32 year olds whose dwellings are somehow less sanitary than the bathrooms at Penn Station. But hey, at least there’s no neon light showing the overwhelming presence of an unidentified but implied white substance on their bedsheets.
Here are the parallels of Room Raiders and Boy Room and why they both work as a product of their respective times:
Right place, right time
Gymnasium’s tagline is “The right shows, in the right place.” In the early 2000s, MTV was the right show because the access to a public platform was not yet democratized. Rich, famous people were on Cribs, and normies were on Room Raiders. This kind of surveillance – the suitors watched the contestant raid their rooms from a van, à la Never Been Kissed – was very normalized in the “upskirt decade” of brutally relentless paparazzi. In the 2020s, TikTok is the right place for a show, not cable TV.
It’s hottie central
Room Raiders was technically a dating show. The contestant would choose a date, sight unseen, based on the context found in the 3 potential suitors’ rooms. Like every TV show at the time, there were only generally conventionally attractive contestants with an “All-American” (read: white; like an Abercrombie catalogue) look. Every contestant is operating under the assumption that their three suitors are people of the opposite sex who they will find attractive. Love is Blind, at least when MTV does the casting.
Now, there’s a very interesting phenomenon where certain people exist on TikTok to be thirst traps. They could be completely normal people, even with a significant other, but their personal brand is to be hot and flirtatious. I find this odd. What has also been normalized is people commenting “omg marry me” or things of the like on complete strangers’ videos. While some Boy Room contestants are attractive, or at least “New York Hot” (members of the creative class with social clout; could be conventionally hot or “ugly hot”), they are living in severe domestic squalor. This does not stop people from commenting things like, ooh is he single?? This makes me lose faith in humanity, but one thing remains: sex sells, even to Gen Z, despite it being a nonphysical, one-sided, parasocial, possibly manufactured-for-an-algorithm attraction through a phone screen.
We love to see it (people suffering)
On Room Raiders, contestants were largely college students or recent grads in their early twenties, presumably in off-campus housing or at their parents’ place. They were not expected to be connoisseurs of design. What made Room Raiders so enjoyable is that you could watch the show and be like, “Oh I’d NEVER do that,” or “I’d NEVER date someone like that!” and have a few laughs at their expense. The irony here is that the Xennials of the Room Raiders era were the last micro-generation at large to be able to actually afford to buy a house in their 20s, 30s, or ever.
Boy Room shows Millennials’ arrested development here, where you see the different (much worse) quality of life for someone in their late 20s/early 30s in modern-day NYC. Crushing costs of living, inflation, debilitating debt, and an economic recession have absolutely annihilated peak and young Millennials in a way that it didn’t Gen Xers/Xennials who were in their 20s in the early 2000s. A duvet cover?? In this economy?? Now, it’s not “oh haha their couch is ugly”, it’s like, “Wow they are a completely incompetent manchild who can’t even throw garbage in a garbage can because they don’t actually own a garbage can. Jfc I sincerely hope this is all staged and that these aren’t real people walking among us.” That is the level of existential dread we live with now. TV isn’t escapism anymore because TV is on our phones and we live there now. We don’t go online anymore, we are online.
It’s just funny
The Simple Life is an incredible example of how sound effects can make a show (similar to a laugh track in sitcoms). With the state of content editing being as violently flashy and fast-paced as possible, it’s no wonder everyone has the attention span of a gnat. I think that a “boing!!!!!” sound is delightfully analog and provides an element of slapstick humor that could be a grounding antidote before our brains, fried by social media overstimulation, atrophy completely.
📲 I’m just a simple girl in a high-tech digital world
My fav things from the internet rn:
Friend of Nicstalgia
Boat shoes are “back”. I knew this day would come. As a Connecticut native and Bostonian college grad, I can share from experience that unfortunately, these never really go away. In terms of mainstream popularity, they’re like cicadas. (FYI, the link is about their “three-week ritual of sex and death in the spring” that I viscerally remember from 1996, not a picture of the bug LOL. I would never do that to you.) As for my own embrace (or lack thereof) of preppy style, I have to draw the line somewhere. I do love my two very cute polo shirts from Aerie – one is a lightweight knit sweater and one is cropped, so they have more feminine and modern silhouettes than 2000s Hollister polos.
Another emerging category that I anticipated: “Smells but in formats that are not jarred candles”. I would say Louis Vuitton’s new book, A Perfume Atlas, falls into this category. The book documents LV’s in-house perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud’s travels around the world to source their perfume ingredients. The book is $160, but there’s also a $5,000 limited-edition box set available at select LV stores that includes extractions of all 45 ingredients catalogued in the book! Very cool. It’s not too late to get me a belated birthday present…
Speaking of fragrance, I went to see the 49th Macy’s Flower Show and the “Miss Dior: From Flower to Fragrance” installation. In-store retail experiences, especially at major flagships, should be more like galleries and museums IMHO. I learned about The New Look in school, but tbh (and despite The New Look TV show having recently come out), I didn’t know anything about Christian Dior’s sister Catherine, for whom Miss Dior was named. She has an incredible story – surviving imprisonment in a concentration camp during WWII, being awarded several medals of honor for her acts of resistance, having been one of the few women (maybe the first, actually?) to get licensed to trade in cut flowers, starting her own rose farm, etc. Very nice experience!
Another exhibit I enjoyed was Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother at The Met. It’s my Physical Media Renaissance meets ‘examining the past through a contemporary lens’. Very Nicstalgic! Now I’m inspired to curate something like this.
“At a time when photographs are primarily shared and saved digitally, many artists are returning to the physicality of snapshots in an album or pictures in an archive as a source of inspiration. Drawing its title, Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, from a photograph by Italian provocateur Maurizio Cattelan, the exhibition consists of works in The Met collection from the 1970s to today that reflect upon the complicated feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality that these objects conjure, while underlining the power of the found object.”
The lovely Nicoletta Richardson did a really thoughtful interview with Steve Burns of Blue’s Clues fame. They chat about Steve’s long stretches of silence – both in present day on TikTok and on Blue’s Clues – his reaction to the longstanding death rumors, struggling with depression, the greatest lesson he learned from his character, the gift of listening, and his new podcast. Ngl sometimes the Mail Song still gets stuck in my head. “Let’s be serious, I never found any clues, really. That was all you.”
🧨 Spice up your life
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