Five years ago New York-based Krickie Pisaturo launched her Instagram feed @Babemania . We're not being hyperbolic when we say it solely posts late ‘90s early ‘00s images. ‘It started as a personal inspiration page that was actually private, I wasn't following anyone and no one followed me. I just wanted to have a place to collect, visualise and post images that inspired me and made me laugh,’ she explains.
Krickie has made a business from this aesthetic, explaining that when she’s not updating her feed, which has 12.9K followers, she is buying and selling clothes that, ‘reflect the Babemania Instagram aesthetic - think Baby Phat meets JLO meets all the young dudes in that Clueless scene’.
Krickie isn’t the only one ruefully reconsidering the Dawson’s Creek decade. Simone Cotellessa of Instagram account @ecce____homo has been diligently posting forgotten shots of models, musicians, adverts and runways from the early 2000s. His nostalgia-riddled feed has grown to 29.4K followers.
Similarly, 22-year-old Australian-based Erin Twomey (the woman behind cult account @shesvague) has been repurposing old paparazzi pictures of Mel C and Destiny’s Child as well as neglected magazine spreads and film stills. Her limitless archive of TRL-era imagery has gained her 73.6K followers.
Summing up her aesthetic as MTV-influenced, Erin told Grapeshot: ‘‘I never realised until looking back at old videos how ridiculously bad the shows are but that’s what makes it so great…it’s so bad but I just can’t look away’.
She sees her feed as a feminist manifesto, adding: ‘a woman can be intelligent and make her own informed decisions whilst still being a sex symbol…I want to challenge the repressive, unequal dominant culture and I believe that every woman has the right to express her gender and sexuality any way she chooses’.
Erin told The Debrief she thinks her feed has a two-pronged appeal: 'I think there's two reasons why, the first is because people love seeing celebrities at their most trashy, wild and drugged up stage in their life, and I post that, a lot. The celebrities I share are completely different to who they once were so it's like, "Oh wow! I totally forgot that Paris Hilton once wanted to get 'coked up' on a yacht. People really love that.
'The second is because the things I post are very nostalgic. They bring back a lot of good memories for some people and that makes them so happy.'
Like an anthropological study, these Instagram accounts reconsider and readjust our thinking on images that were once branded 'trashy'. They romanticise a time when tabloids and the early days of the internet collided and in doing so gave the world an all-access pass to celebrities. Like voyeurs, we can reappraise the sexual freedom of Christina Aguilera's Dirrty phase and Anna Nicole Smith’s colourful wardrobe.
‘It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia’, Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. And, on the most popular image sharing app, Instagram, this sensation is rampant.
Insta’s very purpose is as a chronicler, a documenter, be it of our meals, our friends and even our favourite memes. Users become archivists and posterity of their thoughts and taste is their purpose.
Ever since its early iterations when the app’s logo was a polaroid camera it has made that wistful feeling tangible. At first, this had to do with filters giving that perfect summer of ’69 fade to food photography or adding silent movie glamour through grayscale. While the ‘grams most popular feeds tend to be littered with elegiac sunsets and beaches, this Y2k reappreciation is gaining popularity.
There’s a theory about fashion that boils down to simple arithmetic. The idea is, you take the current year (2017) and minus 15 years, and you’ll find the era today’s trends are inspired by. As emerging designers tend to get their footing at around 30 years old (once they’ve graduated from university and have been grafting a few years), the answer neatly points to their youth. It’s the age when they were at school and likely most influenced by magazines, movies and music. It was a time for them that was free from responsibility and easy to romanticise. If you follow this algorithm, it’s easy to see why the early 2000s are suddenly on trend.
If you look at the catwalk’s the beginning of the noughties have been staging a comeback. Caitlin Price, for instance, has been citing early 2000s sportswear and clubwear as a reference point. And, Vetements collaborated with Juicy Couture on their couture line.
And, so it goes, this era has been infiltrating the Instagram. What might have started as memes of fugly 2001 fashion has transformed into a space for appreciation of everything Y2K.
In On Photography Susan Sontag perfectly explains why pictures of a bronzed youthful Victoria Beckham dripping in Dolce & Gabanna and Paris Hilton living the Simple Life are doing the ‘gram rounds: ‘Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer.
‘A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.'
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.