This is the first installment of a three-part series that will be rolled out during this summer and fall where I look back on my life (and society at the time) 10, 20, and 30 years ago. What was going on with me and the world back in 1996? Read on and pass me some Werthers…

I can hear this image. And what else defined 1996?

OK, a lot more happened that year than just a viral song and dance, but this retrospective will be based not on all the major events that happened in ’96, but on the year in the life of yours truly. You may be wondering how I still remember some things from 30 years ago, in spite of all the things I’ve gone through since then that may or may not have affected my ability to remember old stuff. Simply put: I just do. Not saying I remember 1996 like it happened yesterday, but some memories still stand out for me.

Also, clothes from that year were so damn fun.

*A Young Artist* 

I was eleven years old during most of ’96 and started off the year in sixth grade. I started off the year the same way I started off 1995: a chubby, awkward introvert who liked to draw, read, and write. Except one new thing popped into my life in late ’95 that threw me into a tizzy. I’ll give you a hint of what that was: I’ll likely be done with it in 8-10 years. (And I just realized I’m closer to finishing it than I am from when it started. 😱)

Because I was a chubby, awkward, introverted kid, I was a target for bullies, although it eased up when I entered sixth grade. I don’t know why, but I was grateful to not deal with those asswipes as much as before. (Sadly, they’d be back on my ass in the 7th and 8th grade.) And because I was a chubby, awkward, introverted kid, I thought I’d be a loner in school that year. By the end of the 6th grade, however, I actually made some good friends, and they weren’t make-believe for a change. 😆 I also finished the 6th grade as a young artist of sorts. A drawing of mine that I had done in class would be featured in a local art exhibit. And one of my prose pieces would get published in my local newspaper. (That prose became my very first work to be published.) Sadly, that drawing is long gone, and I had hoped my published prose would be found in the newspaper’s archives online, but that newspaper doesn’t even have an online archive to begin with. 😖

*The Look*

(From left to right: an image from the Delia’s catalog that shows the kind of clothes I wore this year, an image on colorful teen fashion from Seventeen magazine, and an ad for Revlon–one of the brands us pre-teens and teens wore. All from 1996.)

I started reading Seventeen magazine this year; coincidentally, I began to dress up. (No pics of young me here, but my fashion sense from ’95 vs. ’96 is like night and day. I went from frumpy to less frumpy!) One look that was “in” was the baby tee and wide-legged pants. I couldn’t roll in baby tees then (they were practically crop tops and I didn’t have the body for crop tops), so I settled for (as what I called them) “semi-baby tees” that were fitted but long enough to conceal what I wanted concealed, if you know what I mean. And I thrived in wide-legged pants. Anyone who thinks the Zoomers came up with the wide-legged pants trend needs to brush up on their history and read an issue of Seventeen from 30 years ago; Gen X and elder millennials wore them first. About my only issue with them was that many of those pants/jeans were too long for me. So what us “shorties” did then was cuff them up to the length that worked for us, then stapled it so it wouldn’t come loose. (Side note: I was a shortie then, and still a shortie now.)

One great thing about being a pre-teen/teen during the mid-90s was that our It brands were drugstore brands. It worked out for me because where I lived, we didn’t have a Sephora (Sephora kids in the 90s? They didn’t arrive in the States till 1998), and I didn’t have the pockets for brands like Estee Lauder and Chanel. (Those brands were also seen as brands our moms and aunts wore, and that wasn’t cool to us.) We thrived on stuff from Cover Girl, Maybelline, Neutrogena, and Noxzema. And our “clean girl” look then was a slick or two of Lip Smackers (bubble gum and cherry cola flavors for me!) and a few dabs of pressed powder to keep our mugs matte and that was it. The Sephora-addicted teens today could never.

A lot more after the cut…

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