speaking of pastels
I am 24 which is old by tumblr standards apparently,
and I am enjoying how the ~youth of tumblr~ (i.e. people who don’t actually remember the early 90s) are enraging slightly older people with their “soft grunge” and “pastel grunge”, or even better, calling anything with a 90s revival vibe “grunge” (tell me more about how your glow-in-the-dark tie-die smiley face crop top is grunge).
see also: people getting mad about “pastel goth” because “goth means dark colours” or “a colour scheme is not a subculture” or sometimes even both?!
I mean I have pretty mixed feelings about the actual visual content of those subcultures myself, because one thing that is absolutely authentically 90s about them is their saturation level of culturally appropriative motifs (gtfo with your bindis and dripping yin-yang symbols). but people who care about the authenticity of grunge and goth are possibly even more ridiculous than people who get mad about “mall punks”, and they deserve a comeuppance.
first world youth culture’s apathy towards history is irritating at best and can be really fucked up, but there is also a lesson here for aging hipsters, and it is that if you don’t challenge our culture’s obsession with extreme youth while you are yourself young than you will quickly fall into baffled embittered irrelevance.
I am fascinated by teens, especially teen girls, I love how much they care about fashion and how inventive and ahead of the curve they are, but I hate how they become images that are used and chewed up and spat out by the culture industries. & it’s more complicated than that again because of course the sixth sense teens have for the next trend is partly self-fulfilling, because they’re watched so carefully by the people who market those trends.
it’s resistance and capitalism and exploitation and exploration and self-representation and cultural theft and narcissism in one big, messy, fucked-up ball and if the thing that makes you the maddest is “that’s not grunge!” then I don’t understand you.
