They're Vintage Charlotte Russe Shorts
Social media bans, Jewel's "Intuition", vintage Y2K, "Behind These Hazel Eyes" painting 🎨
Hello beautiful readers! Idk if it’s eclipse season that’s making my clairsentience really kick in, but there have been several recent instances where I was talking about something on IG and then it became newsworthy days or a week later. My Fountains of Wayne trip became a question on Jeopardy. My Jewel “Intuition” deep dive (below) begot an Elle interview, and my excursion to Charlotte Russe turned into a viral TikTok. You heard it here first, baby!!!
In this issue:
📵 They’ve been trying to ban social media since before it was even called social media
💰 What Jewel’s 2003 ‘sellout’ hit “Intuition” is really about
🩳 The “vintage Charlotte Russe” TikTok that shook Millennials to their core
🎨 I made a triptych painting and named it after a Kelly Clarkson song hehe
📲 Julia Stiles living her best life, Legally Blonde TV show, Taylor Swift being smart again
ICYMI, last week’s issue primarily focused on the best art exhibits I saw last week (i.e. one including a miniature model of Miley Cyrus’s tongue slide), the el.f. x Liquid Death collab, a new show that’s basically Room Raiders, the unfortunate staying power of boat shoes, Jessica Simpson’s dessert beauty line, etc.
Support Nicstalgia with a paid subscription for less than the unusually, comically large-sized prop copy of The Bell Jar that Kat Stratford reads in 10 Things I Hate About You. Bday special on annual subs lasts through Aries season!
Huge thank you to Nicstalgia supporters who I will love forever: Janine, Marie, Liv, Mitra, and CY! 💐💐💐
📵 “Should Social Networking Web Sites Be Banned?”
The potential, albeit implausible, TikTok ban and recent digital privacy legislation make “Should Social Networking Web Sites Be Banned?” — a book from 2008, that I thrifted for $1, about the moral implications of MySpace — still very relevant today.
This book was comprised of chapters of politicians, community leaders, journalists, and interest groups who took their stance on whether or not MySpace and other social networking websites should be banned and why. I have a lot of takeaways and favorite quotes/thought starters from the book:
Now that we all have our own personal devices, we don’t “go” online anymore. We just are online and we never leave. The concern about kids being on social media has taken a different form because parents are on their phones maybe even more so than their kids are.
Prohibiting access to social media instead of educating kids on how to use the internet doesn’t actually promote safety; it’s like abstinence-based sex education.
“Social networking is viewed as a threat, because it largely belongs to the insular, chaotic world of teenagers, which many adults do not understand.”
“Teachers could empower students by helping them become content creators, who share original material, rather than simply duplicate the work of others.” Oh wow. If only they knew what ‘content creator’ would mean in the years to come and that content creators on TikTok would primarily duplicate the work of others.
“Inexperienced and naïve, [young people] share their biographical information, interests, location, and inviting photos for the world to see on these websites.” Funny because this is exactly what Boomers do on Facebook.
“[Youth] call it my space because it belongs to them, not you.” Very true that there really aren’t many spaces online just for young people anymore.
To that point: “My 12th grade, daughter’s MySpace site is unbearable. Animated gifts, flashing graphics, dopey, poses, horrific music, yellow text on hot pink backgrounds, and other elements of web design assault your senses until you run away or quit the browser. Much of MySpace’s content is inane, but we should avoid destroying the place 21st-century kids built for themselves.”
“MySpace and new look-alike sites will eventually make chat rooms passé.” This was said right around when texting was really taking off as the norm. Now, everyone’s trying to recreate the intimacy of a chatroom or AIM instant message in private group chats or gated community apps.
“If it all disappeared one day — IM and Facebook, MySpace and email — would you care?” We’ve seen so many web1 and web2 platforms as we originally knew them die – AIM, MySpace, Xanga, etc. and it will only continue to evolve. Brings up the question about web3 and content ownership. If Instagram was gone tomorrow, many influencers without an owned connection to their fans would lose their audiences, and therefore their livelihoods, instantly.
“Cynicism and irony can only go so far. Eventually, the pendulum has to swing the other way, and it becomes cool again to care about things.” The Gen X to Millennial Chasm exemplified.
This is in regards to oversharing online and speaks to the fear mongering about future employers seeing the 100 photos someone uploaded from a frat party or a night at the bar. I just love any reference to Coyote Ugly. “The issue is less knowing that you passed out under the bar at Coyote Ugly than knowing that you’re telling the world about it.”
“The next wave of the virtual community, begun with the cyber social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, is mobile social networking, software, or MoSoSo.” Omg LOL I’m so glad that ‘social media’ became a part of the lexicon and not ‘MoSoSo’. Imagine??
“It’s not a matter of ‘if’ the mobile phone will prove important, it’s just a matter of how fast.” Mic drop.
Relatedly, Max Read made great points in Should we just ban *all* social media? re: how we got here and what happens next:
“Look, “social media” in a broad sense is undoubtedly a cause of a host of overlapping crises in politics, trust, sociality, being normal, etc., but it didn’t arrive from nowhere in 2003, fully formed and ready to wreak havoc…[Big tech companies that own social media platforms] were encouraged by the structures of funding, business models, regulatory regimes (or lack thereof), cultural subjectivities, consumer behaviors etc. that they have encountered as they develop.
A real response to social media has to recognize that as much as it shapes the world (and us) in awful and damaging ways it was itself shaped by the world (and us) to be precisely what it is.”
💰 It will lead you in the right direction…
You may have noticed the section I usually include in this newsletter titled, ‘I’m just a simple girl a high-tech digital world’. It links out to the music video for Jewel’s “Intuition”, which came out 21 years ago this week. When that song was released in 2003, people were upset that Jewel committed the ultimate Gen X sin: she sold out. She traded in her folksy roots and sexed it up with a new poppy, glossy, smooth, highly manufactured sound. In 1995, she yodeled, “Who Will Save Your Soul?” and in 2003, it was more like ‘who will sell your soul?’
(Sidebar: I am forever grateful that Liz Phair sold out, despite receiving much more vicious criticism than Jewel did. Her mainstream popularity, aided by the power of the early internet, was how I discovered and fell in love with her pre-“Why Can’t I” catalog as a millennial teenager.)
Looking back at “Intuition”, it’s clearly intended as satire, but people back then just didn’t get it. The general population was already over the Blonde Fab Four (what I am calling Britney, Christina, Jessica, and Mandy). All of them evolved their wholesome image into a more provocative one, exploiting their sexuality and becoming commodified brands to be bought and sold. Anti-Britneys like P!nk and Avril were already on the scene, creating market competition. By 2003, consumers already knew the 90s were out and the 00s were in. Goodbye to riot grrrls, female singer-songwriters, and bubblegum pop-purveying girl-next-door clones. Hello to the ‘upskirt’ decade of tabloids, sensation, spectacle, fallout from second-wave feminism, and the mainstream proliferation of celebrity sex tapes and reality TV. “Intuition” sounds far more like a Pussycat Dolls song than what you’d heard at Lilith Fair.
Since then, Jewel has come back to her center. She is exploring the metaverse, she’s becoming a hologram, and she had her IG audience guess how she got a cut on her finger. (A raven bit her.) Tracks. In present day, “Intuition” comes off as post-ironic rather than a satire to me. We know she’s joking about how vapid and pervasive consumerism is, but she’s actually also being serious about following ‘your intuition’, aka. your compulsion to buy her record, because she needs to make money off it. This dichotomy keeps me up at night. For over a year, I’ve been thinking about “Intuition” – not just as another mainstream pop song, but as a statement on the implications of mass media and technology on consumer behavior and identity in a postmodern society. Let’s dive into these lyrics and what they really mean.
🎶 “I’m just a simple girl in a high tech digital world” 🎶
Jewel really is just a woman from Alaska with an acoustic guitar and a dream. She was only 28 when “Intuition” came out. This is around the age of The Chasm™ (and Saturn return btw). There is immense pressure to not ‘age out’, especially as a woman, especially as a celebrity, especially before access to ‘celebrity’ was democratized through social media. Technology broke the music industry as we knew it and forced it to evolve; this song came out THE SAME MONTH that the iTunes Store first opened. So while this statement is true, we in no way could have anticipated just how much of a digital world we would come to live in.
🎶 “They say Miss J’s big butt is boss, Kate Moss can’t find a job. In a world of postmodern fad, what was good, now is bad” 🎶
As long as patriarchy exists and is the underlying foundation of society, the unbelievable pressure of aesthetic labor, the pursuit of an unrealistic beauty standard defined by the male gaze, the irreparable damage of body image issues and eating disorders, and the commodification, exploitation, and insatiable desire for men’s control over women’s bodies will remain. Women can immediately be told that they are “bad”. That their bodies are “bad”. In the 90s, you needed to be heroin chic like Kate Moss. In the 2000s, your butt needed to look like Jennifer Lopez’s. Have the “wrong” body? It’s okay babe, just buy _____ and you can fix it!!!!! In 2024, replace the word ‘fad’ with ‘trend’ or ‘aesthetic’ and you see society hasn’t come as far in 21 years as we’d like to think.
🎶 “It’s not hard to understand, just follow this simple plan” 🎶
The plan: be who you need to be in order to sell records!!!! Jewel was molded by her label to fit into a more palatable, marketable, profitable box. It worked; this song got people talking about her again. She girlbossed her way to the top (or at least to number 2 on the US charts) by playing into an already-broken system, abandoning any artistic integrity she’d previously established in her career. In terms of her legacy, she’s had such career longevity at this point that one pop-oriented album (with only one song from it that anyone remembers) is kind of a blip on the radar.
🎶 “Follow your heart, your intuition. It will lead you in the right direction” 🎶
We are following our hearts, but we are unreliable narrators. Our ‘intuition’ is not so much an internal, visceral knowing, but a conditioned consumer behavior that tells us to want, crave, buy, consume, and spend. The ‘right direction’ is higher status, more wealth, and consolidated power in order to navigate society leveraging whatever privileges we have for upward mobility, optimized productivity, output maximization, and the ever-elusive ideal of ‘success’.
🎶 “You look at me but you’re not quite sure, am I it or could you get more? 🎶
This line to me is a wonderful play on ‘the paradox of choice’, speaking to our consistent exposure to advertisements and therefore the sheer amount of consumeristic choices we must make on a daily basis. It’s made us opportunistic, embracing a capitalist free-market economic ideology. Why would I buy this shirt when I can get that one on sale? Why would I buy this soda when my favorite celebrity endorsed that one? We’ve been trained to weigh all of our options, confident that we will always have a high-quality selection of objects to choose from. *Not* buying something is the only option we don’t have as consumers.
🎶 You learn cool from magazines, you learn love from Charlie Sheen” 🎶
Our society conflates its value system – money, status, fame, and power – with ethics. Therefore, we assume that celebrity, or what we see in magazines, is inherently good. It’s not good or bad; it’s just entertainment. But because Hollywood’s cultural production is inextricably linked with American morality, esteem, and acclaim, behavioral norms and conventions are modeled after what people see on-screen. I’ve seen old magazines from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s – complete with horrifyingly outdated advice we would now find egregiously offensive – but you might be surprised to find out that the more recent magazines aged way worse than the ones from 50 years ago.
🎶 “If you want me, let me know. I promise I won't say no.” 🎶
While I find this lyric problematic from the POV of it being a double entendre for a lack of consent, I think it’s brilliant from the POV of it showing that corporate greed –and the financial and emotional desperation for the sustained relevance fame provides – knows no limits. Our sociopolitical and economic systems have warped our conventions of both material value and self-worth to an extent that we have become mindless consumeristic zombies, programmed for consumption, recklessly in pursuit of material objects, driven to buy in order to fill the void of our insidious self-discrepancies. When it comes to buying things, we really won’t ever say no. The things we buy shape our worldview; they support our definition of who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to others in the world.
🎶 “You got something that you wantin' me to sell. Sell your sin, just cash in.” 🎶
Jewel spoke to the cycle of fads that excessive consumerism created but was also contributing to that very cycle which gave her earlier music a cultural expiration date. The music video was spoofing Sprite, Levi's, Nike, and Corona commercials, but “Intuition” was licensed for a Schick Intuition razor commercial!!!! (Apparently the same name was serendipitous, unplanned, and unintentional.) Jewel knows that she’s a reliable salesperson and will gladly take that fat check from Schick. She also knows that we the public are more than happy to pay, whatever the price.
🩳 Yes, “Y2K” is vintage, but it’s okay
About 3 weeks ago, in anticipation of a trip to my local mall, I said that Charlotte Russe better be the same as I remember them from the 2000s: the trashy (endearing) store where you could get apocalypse-proof stilettos, slouchy faux-leather boots, and “going out tops”. While the clothes are technically different, I’m happy to report the general vibe is the same.
Now, people are going bonkers over a mega-viral TikTok because this young girl thrifted vintage Charlotte “Russ” (as she pronounces them) shorts. As I talked about in a recent Nicstalgia episode, Millennials have experienced The Chasm™, where they have the realization (and resentment) of no longer being the fixture generation of youth culture. (Aka. they feel bad bc they think they’re old.) Realizing a store you used to shop at seemingly not long ago is “vintage” apparently brings up a lot of feelings. I personally think it’s lovely to see people thrifting Charlotte Russe, because it means the clothing is not already [not] decomposing in a landfill.
Technically, “vintage” describes anything 20-100 years old, so Charlotte Russe could technically qualify. Friend of Nicstalgia
is always looking for another word to better describe clothes that don’t yet qualify as vintage. I think “dated” might be a good word to describe clothes ~5-20 years old, because it points to the fact that they have reached a point of obsolescence in the trend cycle but haven’t aged quite enough to reach mainstream revival appeal.Let me know in the comments if you have a take on what this word should be, and absolutely send me a message if you have any Charlotte Russe core memories. Browned out on Burnett’s and hobbled to the bar in subzero temperatures without a jacket? Maintained a solid sorority squat while taking digital camera selfies, with an obscuringly bright flash, in a dirty, smudged mirror? Did an impromptu drunken cartwheel on concrete, somehow without twisting an ankle? Had a sloppy, sweaty dancefloor makeout with that medium ugly guy from your dorm? Charlotte Russe shoes have been there for us through it all, and we love them for that.
🎨 Behind these hazel eyes
In celebration of the 19th anniversary (!!!!) of “Behind These Hazel Eyes”, I’d like to share my triptych painting of the same name. You can also collect this piece on Zora!
It was a gorgeous day last May, and I thought it would be fun and therapeutic to paint on my rooftop. A stressful extended work trip prevented me from fully settling into my new place a month earlier, and I’d unsuccessfully searched Etsy for wall art that resonated with me. Too generic. Too expensive. Too ugly. Not “me” enough. As you may know, I made a custom print for over my TV consisting of “Drama Queen (That Girl)” lyrics in WordArt typefaces, perfectly matching the unhinged-yet-satisfying, kitschy look I was going for. But for my bedroom, I wanted something personal, creative, and in contrast, relatively calm.
So up to the roof I went, armed with a paintbrush, three blank canvases, and a vague vision. I started painting blobby shapes and HATED them. This couldn’t possibly be the same person whose favorite childhood school subject was art! What happened? Do I suck at painting? (The Aries urge to not do anything I don’t immediately excel in…) I started over completely, coating the canvases in solid sage green and beige shades that match my duvet cover and throw pillows. Half frustrated and half inspired, by both my work burnout and apparent lack of artistic ability, I flicked splatters of paint onto the canvas. The water-diluted black added a contrast that specifically reminded me of crying when you’re wearing a ton of mascara. (I had done a lot of this on my work trip, so it was a viscerally familiar sensation.) I don’t remember if the Kelly Clarkson song came on my playlist (a very probable situation) or if I was just overcome by sudden catharsis, but the name came to me: Behind These Hazel Eyes. There are so many songs about brown- and blue-eyed people, it was about time there was a song about me hazel-eyed people. I suppose life really does imitate art.
📲 I’m just a simple girl in a high-tech digital world
My fav things from the internet rn:
Enjoyed this interview with Julia Stiles, fellow Aries, who I was always jealous of as a teen for her onscreen and offscreen romances with my holy trinity: Freddie Prinze Jr., Heath Ledger, and Josh Hartnett. (AND Joseph Gordon-Levitt btw. Hurts to see someone living your dream life, but I’m okay.) Kat Stratford is one of my fav movie characters of all time, and it was fun to learn that in addition to 10 Things I Hate About You, screenwriters Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith wrote two of my other favorite movies – Legally Blonde and She’s The Man. I’m gonna have to dig deeper into these Alpha, Beta, and Gamma teenage girl stereotypes the article mentions.
Speaking of Legally Blonde, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (the duo behind The OC) are writing and producing a spinoff series for Amazon based on the 2001 film. What, like it’s hard??? A Legally Blonde 3 film has allegedly been in the works for a while now. That may not happen, but if it does, Reese has already insisted that Jennifer Coolidge needs to reprise her role. I would absolutely not object to that.
Loved this piece from Robin James, Taylor Swift’s new grief-vibes playlists turn her old albums into the musical equivalent of securitized assets. Swift’s five Apple Music playlists reorder her songs based the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While I am gravely concerned about therapy-speak infiltrating the lexicon at a time when media literacy, social agility, and collective emotional resilience is seemingly at an all-time low, this is super on-brand for Swift. This woman knows how to use (exploit?) emotions – both her own and her fans’ – to her economic advantage, that’s for damn sure.
🧨 Spice up your life
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