Georgia Hampton: Hey, everybody. It's producer Georgia. This
week, we're bringing you an archive pull from the Never Post
Vault, and we're pulling my first ever segment from the
first ever episode of the show. In it, I talked to professor
Elizabeth Wissinger about how the rise of algorithmic online
social platforms helped erase an entire demographic Fashion for
Girls, upheld by brands such as Limited Too and Delia's. Now,
girls aged nine to 12 don't have a style curated specifically for
them.
Instead, they dress like their moms. When I first wrote this
segment two years ago, micro trends and aesthetics were at
their zenith. The latest styles cannibalized each other in a
matter of weeks, and they had nothing to do with how old you
were. If you wanted to dress like an office siren, a mob
wife, or anything that could have core attached to the end of
it, you could find a mood board that would get you there. But
now micro trends have kind of gone out of style.
I don't see the videos I used to see, where once a month, someone
would proudly declare that a new trend was on the horizon. In
some ways, we've moved back to the more old school forms of
trend predicting, where individual types of clothing or
accessories are pointed to as the next big thing. Every year
has an it shoe or an it bag. Now, more than anything, the
sign of good style has more to do with how many hours you're
willing to spend at the thrift or scrolling through Depop. But
on Depop, someone my age, 32, is much more likely to try to buy a
pair of now vintage shoes from Delia's than anyone else.
So has this shift away from the carousel of trends made space
for the tween girl demographic to begin again? Not really. The
closest thing to a tween centered style I've seen lately
isn't even being worn by real kids. It's being sported by
American Girl Dolls. This year, to mark the fortieth anniversary
of the brand, American Girl debuted a modern era version of
their original six historical dolls.
These girls have ditched their petticoats and nineteenth
century lace up shoes for polka dot dresses and white sneakers.
Sneakers. My favorite doll, Josefina, whose story originally
took place in 1824, no longer wears her signature shawl and
big red skirt. Now, she wears a white button down, a red
miniskirt, and little white cowboy boots with flowers on
them. She has a tiny leather shoulder bag.
And in another fashion landscape, these dolls could be
a great representation of what Tween fashion looks like,
if it still existed.
But instead, modern day Josefina just kind of looks like she's
wearing a costume. And while young girls might reach for her,
tweens aren't really playing with dolls. They're online. Even
after the empire of cottagecore rose and fell, the social
internet still has the last say about how fashion trends spread
to the masses. And tween fashion as a demographic shows no sign
of returning.
Kevin: Okay. Alright. So I'm just gonna ask you about what
you were talking about the other night. So tell me about that,
about how some of the kids at your school dressed.
Speaker 4: Okay. A lot of the girls in my grade dress just
like their moms is what I found. They all dress like, I don't
mean this as an insult. If I could live this life, I would,
but, kinda like a stay at home mom who runs errands all day and
goes to the gym whenever she can because both the girls at my
school and their moms always wear Lululemon.
Georgia Hampton: That's a conversation between a friend of
the show, Kevin, and his daughter, who's 13 years old.
And what she's talking about here is this strange thing that
seems to be happening.
Speaker 4: It's like sometimes I'll, like, see an older woman
from behind and I'll be like, is that like so and so from my
school? No. That is somebody that could be their mom.
Georgia Hampton: That just feels so weird to me. And listen, I'm
30 years old. This is a world I'm not a part of anymore. But
when I was 13, it would have been mortifying to dress like
your mom. It would also be extremely bizarre.
I'm imagining myself arriving at school in a pair of black
stretchy capris with a loose knit leopard print sweater and
perhaps a decorative beaded necklace, like just showing up
to eighth grade history class in h to t Chico's, it's
unimaginable. When I was in that nine to twelve tween age bracket
back in the mid two thousands, I had my own ecosystem of fashion
that felt like it was made specifically for me, and that's
because it was. Limited Too, Claire's, Justice, Libby Lou, a
whole suite of brands whose thing was making clothes and
accessories for young girls like me, or frankly, making an entire
space for young girls. And over the last ten years or so, pretty
much all of those places disappeared. And I wondered if
that had anything to do with what I and Kevin's daughter have
noticed happening.
Georgia Hampton: I wanna paint you a picture. The inside of a
limited two was this color coded, candy scented, fantasy
world for girls. Everything was blue and green or pink and
orange. The store had a huge light up pink daisy on the
ceiling and the carpet was this super bright barney shade of
purple. Over by the register, you could buy push pops or baby
bottle pops or bubble tape.
Famously, you could get your ears pierced, which I did. And
limited to was just one of a bunch of places that looked like
this. Growing up, there was even a tween home goods store called
Dry Ice at the mall near me, available for all my beaded
curtain, lava lamp, blow up pink lounge chair needs. That's what
made all these brands different. They created a tween look, a
tween demographic.
Everything there was funky without being offensive or cool
in the eyes of an 11 year old, but not like dangerously cool.
This wasn't Hot Topic or God forbid Spencer's gifts. Nothing
at limited two would get you sent to the principal's office.
It was p g rated fashion. But now obviously, things are very
different.
Limited two left the mall in 2010. Libby Lou declared
bankruptcy, then Claire's, then Justice. And that was it. No
other stores stepped in to take the daisy clad hot pink plastic
blow up throne of tween fashion. Like I said, I'm not a tween.
But even I noticed this. And a lot of other people did too,
especially on TikTok.
Speaker 5: The 10 year olds have nowhere to go. They know where
to go.
Speaker 6: There seems to no longer be a market for
specifically preteen and teenage gals. Everybody keeps talking
about how it's 10 and 12 year olds in Sephora and Ulta, but
they're not talking about how there's no tween stage of life
anymore. Once you turn, like, 10, 11, 12, you start jumping
and doing stuff like you do, like, at 17, 18 because there's
no gap in between because everybody forgot about the fact
that kids are children even as teenagers. Nowhere to go.
Georgia Hampton: What this tells me is that when it comes to
fashion, the tween demographic isn't really important to brands
anymore. So what is?
Elizabeth Wissinger: My name is professor Elizabeth Wissinger. I
am a professor of sociology at the CUNY Community College of
Borough Manhattan Community College, BMCC. I am a professor
of liberal studies with a concentration in fashion studies
at the CUNY Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
And I am really interested in how technologies and bodies
interact in ways that affect society over time.
Georgia Hampton: I talked with professor Wissinger to
understand what had taken the place of the quote, unquote,
Tween brand. And perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a lot
going on here, and there's a lot of factors at play. But
according to professor Wissinger, it all starts with
the rise of the social Internet. Before we had Twitter and TikTok
and Instagram, changes in fashion were dictated by a very
small, very specific set of gatekeepers.
Elizabeth Wissinger: You had to be an editor at a fashion
magazine, or you had to be somebody photographed in a
street style blog. And prior to blogs, you had to be a fashion
model or somebody who was going to the shows who might be
photographed outside the tents or or a socialite.
Georgia Hampton: This meant that the pool of people making
decisions was small. And then with the social Internet, that
power started to shift. You weren't only looking at
magazines, you were looking at people online, on Instagram or
YouTube or more recently TikTok, especially TikTok.
Elizabeth Wissinger: Get ready with me for my Barbie shoot.
Speaker 4: Get ready with me for picture day.
Speaker 5: Welcome to a day in my life as a full time content
creator. I woke up this morning and got ready just threw on a
cute little tracksuit, made my bed.
Speaker 4: What to wear when you don't know
Elizabeth Wissinger: what to wear. So first, we need
concealer. The opportunity to create an online presence for
yourself, market yourself, become a brand in and of
yourself became an option. But brands always have associations.
They don't have any meaning unless they're connected to
other brands out there in the brand universe.
So when you're doing self branding, you are using the
tools of branding to present a persona that will gain you
notoriety or fame or acclaim.
Georgia Hampton: So if you have a phone and an Internet
connection, you could, in theory, start establishing
yourself as a tastemaker. Someone to be taken seriously, a
person with special and unique ideas about fashion. You can
build your own little island around yourself as a voice worth
listening to. You can do it. Anyone can do it.
Everyone can do it. But that comes with its own problem.
Elizabeth Wissinger: A lot of individual voices create kind of
like a cacophony that ends up sort of blending into just one
loud sound, and it so flattens out the individual inflection of
individualized personalities in terms of how the public
interprets them.
Georgia Hampton: It's this shaving down of nuance. Everyone
is an individual online, but because everyone is unique, no
one is. It's a weird tension between wanting to be special
and different, but also attractive to a lot of people.
Elizabeth Wissinger: It's like you wanna appeal to the masses
with your individuality, which has been the conundrum of being
fashionable since the beginning of fashion. But now it's, like,
on steroids with the fact that everyone can be a fashion
influencer if they use these tools.
Georgia Hampton: What matters here is bridging that gap
between uniqueness and accessibility. A fashion trend
should be interesting, which means it should have something
new to say or a new take on an old idea. But you don't wanna
limit your potential audience. And declaring any given trend as
a tween style just doesn't seem to make sense anymore. Or as
professor Wissinger put
Elizabeth Wissinger: it It seems that it's less lucrative to to
limit your marketing to a specific age group now than it
was then. So if you're a teen and you're showing how to
construct a look, if you wanna go viral with your post, you
don't wanna post, this look is for teens. You want everybody
interested in your look. And if you're an older, more mature
influencer, you're not gonna say, well, these outfits are
only good for 50 and older. You may go in as a mature influencer
and say, look, I can look like this as a 50 and older, but
really, you can learn from my look no matter what age you are.
Georgia Hampton: That's why you get 13 year olds dressing like
they're athleisure moms. Because the marketing is for as many
people as possible. Age specific trends just don't matter in the
way they might have in the two thousands. What does matter is
having trends that are appealing and interesting to the widest
margin of people regardless of how old they are. So for a girl
aged 10 to 12, the question is no longer what does a tween girl
my age dress like?
It's just who do you wanna be? It's more about an aesthetic
than anything else. You can be goblin core if you're into
collecting little trinkets and wearing brown and green, or
maybe you're a coastal grandma, which means you basically dress
how Diane Keaton currently dresses, turtlenecks and lots of
linen. Whatever hyper specific niche you're looking for,
there's a mood board for it. The point is that you're the
tastemaker of your specific individual style.
Well, you and your algorithm.
Elizabeth Wissinger: I mean, there are suites of products
that people are identified with in terms of the algorithms that
look at, like, where you shop, when you shop, how you shop,
what you buy. Like, all of the that information is being
processed all the time. So the Lululemon people, the kids and
the moms might be just inside a very narrowly defined
algorithmic space that markets very specifically to that income
bracket, geographic location, that ZIP code, that private
school.
Georgia Hampton: Okay. So instead of your age mattering in
regards to fashion trends, it's more about where the algorithm
can place you geographically, sure, but also monetarily, your
race, your aesthetic interests, a whole host of other
signifiers, but not necessarily your age. So instead of limited
to existing as a tween only space, you have trends that are
catering to a specific vibe, a specific corner of the
algorithmic space that the machine brain of the Internet
has placed you into based on your measurable qualities. But
that has its limits. Sure, the algorithm can give you this
extremely curated experience that is handpicked for you
specifically.
But if there's just more of a certain kind of content and it
becomes inescapable, the more you interact with it, the more
the algorithm thinks you like it, rinse and repeat forever. To
put it another way, those kids Kevin's daughter was talking
about, like, I'm sure their TikTok for you page looks
different than mine, but it might not look different from
other women my age who might, I don't know, be into athleisure
in a major way.
Speaker 4: I, like, was scrolling on TikTok, and I see,
like, like, this girl dancing and then her mom. And they're
wearing almost identical outfits, but one was blue and
the other one was pink. They looked the same, but one was
like twenty years older. I was kinda like, wow.
Mike Rugnetta: This is real. I don't know.
Georgia Hampton: Thanks to Kevin and his daughter for sharing
their thoughts and thanks to professor Elizabeth Wissinger
for her fascinating insight on all of this. You can read more
of her work online and in her book, This Year's Model Fashion,
Media, and the Making of Glamour. There's also a part of
this story that didn't make it into the episode because I'm
kind of still parsing through it. Basically, I think there's
something really wonderful about kids being able to create their
own fashion identity in this super individual way. But I also
think it's weird that middle school girls are being mistaken
for their own parents based on the way they dress.
And I want to hear what you think about this. How does this
strike you? How does it make you feel? Call us and leave us a
voicemail. Send us a voice memo.
Write us an email. All of the ways you can get a hold of us
are down in the show notes.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the archival episode we have for you
today. If you'd like to listen to the original upload with news
and interstitials, you can find a link in the show notes. Never
Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this
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helping us keep the show going.
Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton,
and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior
producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason
Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rignetta.
Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is
distributed by Radiotopia.