My mother was born in 1971. Her prime years of adolescence were spent maintaining a perm, working out to Jane Fonda, and observing hip-hop’s early ascension to its golden age. I am continually fascinated with my mother’s era, long before my brother and I were blips on her horizon of life fulfillment. She was, despite us, a full-fledged individual human before she added “mother” to her selfhood. She lived, as did I, her teenage years in an era marked with rampant consumerism, cultural shifts, and material expressions of self which ultimately shaped our teen girl-isms.
Thicker hair in only TEN DAYS! Make the boys drool!
Heaps of ‘80s-era “Seventeen Magazines” and issues of “Rolling Stone” lie restful on my coffee table, each waiting to be picked up and leafed through by my mother’s hands and given a new bout of attention through our calls. She plucked through relationship quizzes marked with her pencil scribbles, skimmed over ads for fat camps—yes, fat camps—and shampoo endorsements promising a sweet strawberry scent would attract even the coolest guy in school. Consumerism works to capitalize off of promises of beauty, which turn, then, into promises of love, success, and popularity.
“I remember feeling envious when I read articles like this,” my mother explains while holding a photo of 16-year-old Holly Bolles, the 1983 winner of the New York Modeling Contest. “It makes you wanna be seen as pretty, seen as these people, and be chosen.”
Train to be a model … or just look like one
Attaching your identity to materialistic endeavors is a never-ending cycle of disappointment and comparison. Most are aware, and yet it’s almost impossible to not interact with this consumerist landscape. One brief scroll through a social media homepage will yield ads for $20 dresses with $40 shipping, “sustainable” phone cases made from repurposed beeswax, and accounts dedicated to sourcing the UNIF cardigan that Emma Chamberlain posted in over the weekend. And these aren’t on-the-nose target infomercials with a Katy Perry song in the background. The culture requires more. Even if it’s not an explicitly branded mobile game ad, Instagram is bloated with a plethora of covert ads selling “cool.” Subtly integrating products or aesthetics into a broader sense of effortlessness and chicness—a life you are just one product away from living.
While the internet changed consumerist culture forever and in ways that are not yet completely understood, the core of its practices follows the same cultural formula that was so rampant in the ‘80s.
Magazines were (and currently making a comeback) a booming culture hub. Similar to social media, they are the lifeline for staying relevant within the pop culture circles people care about. Gossip columns, self-expression, teen heartthrobs, fashion trends, rock and roll scandals, and the releases that follow them opened the floodgates for Internet culture and existence amongst the ever-growing blogosphere.
Conversely, magazines propelled the normalcy of conflating identity with consumption. These tactics are built off of the teen girls’ alleged quest for male validation, and it is wishful thinking to say that the industry has been completely liberated of that.
I Shop Therefore I Am
The ‘80s was an era synonymous with materialism. It was the rise of middle America and conspicuous consumerism. Barbara Kruger, “I shop therefore I am.” art installation satirized this era perfectly.
Catalog shopping and magazine culture were a huge benefactor in this, both reflecting and shaping the zeitgeist at the same time. Imagine you’re a teenager in the ‘80s: no phone, no social media. The internet and celebrity culture was just barely finding its footing, but would not explode until the digital age of the early 2000s. “Seventeen,” “Vogue,” and “Rolling Stone” were cultural bibles. Magazines were social media. While there was a community aspect as well as entertainment value the majority of its success hinged upon one thing: ads.
Buy my product or you will be ugly forever. Is that what you want, freak?
“There definitely was an air of, ‘you can be whatever you wanna be’ but with something of an undercurrent of ‘it’s not that easy’—but that’s true now too,” my mother says. “It was building on ‘60s and ‘70s political movements and stuff, but with this continual battle of having to look a certain way, and be a certain weight. Expecting a certain wage gap. But it was better than the generation before. And the next generation will be better than this one.”
