New name, new shoes
I bought the Birkenstock Bostons, and I have Thoughts.
I see you with your finger hovering above the unsubscribe button. You never signed up for a newsletter called Low Rise Jeans — in fact, the mere mention of low rise jeans catapults you into a full body cringe. You want out.
Something like two years ago, you signed up for a newsletter called Screentime and Despair, a joke of a name I’ve since decided I can’t stand. The urge to rebrand happens with me every few years; this is why I could never get a tattoo or — gasp — put a sticker on my laptop.
Despite the clothing-focused name, I promise this hasn’t morphed into a fashion newsletter. In writing about parenting and books and just, like, my life, I’ve realized that I cannot tell a story without bringing up something about the time period between 1999 and 2003. And what defines that era better than low rise jeans? (This is a rhetorical question laced with sarcasm.)
I have this very specific memory from maybe 2002 of trying to leave the house in extreme low-rise jeans and my mom gently suggesting that one’s jeans should always cover one’s belly button. Today, I know she was right — in fact, I would counter that they should go at least 5 inches above your belly button, please see Ava from Hacks for the gold standard— but at the time it was like my mom was on one shoulder and Britney Spears was on the other shoulder. “Higher,” said my mom. “Lower,” said Britney. Of course I listened to Britney.
Word on the street is that low rise jeans are back. Overwhelming millennial sentiment is that we’re ANGRY about this and other early aughts fashion revivals. Did we teach you nothing??! we think, as we watch a gen z tiktoker wearing a choker explain how to achieve the perfect middle part. Haven’t we suffered enough?! we cry into the void of our instagram stories that no one sees because of a vengeful algorithm that’s punishing us for not making reels. Never again, we say, co-opting a phrase that we’ve sort of forgotten was originally intended for the Holocaust, not those awful black platform slides (you know the ones).
But aside from the low rise jeans thing, I'm sort of delighted by the return of everything from my high school years. In the early 2000s, I was at the mercy of where my parents would let me shop (Wal-Mart, mostly, the one with the three giant crosses looming behind it — luv u, Baton Rouge). Because I truly thought clothes were the way to make friends and influence people, and (I suspect) because I had Real Problems I wanted to distract myself from, I spent a lot of time and energy worrying about having the right clothes.
I never had them (thanks for nothing, Christian Wal-Mart).
I would clock my peers wearing something — a very specific pair of Adidas tennis shoes, Abercrombie button down shirts (that tiny moose emblem was key), a tri-colored Gap anorak — and became convinced this was the secret to fitting in. By the time I persuaded my parents to let me get these things, when they were 40% off sale price, everyone had moved on and the cycle started over.
(There was one year where these black doc martens were popular and I just happened to find one pair on sale during the trend’s short lifespan. My parents agreed I could get them. They were a size 10. I wore a size 7. I bought them anyway, wore them, likely ruined my feet, and probably looked like a clown. No one asked me to prom or invited me to a party.)
Anyway, this is part of the reason why when Birkenstock Bostons re- entered the cultural zeitgeist and my consciousness, I had to have them.
As a teenager who felt a little too weird to be wearing ultra-preppy Abercrombie, not carefree enough to embody Hollister, and not interesting enough to go full Hot Topic — and that was pretty much the extent of the stores in my mall — the Birkenstock Bostons felt like a bridge between all those identities. They said to the world, “oh hey, I just got a call from one of my many friends for an impromptu road trip to [the DMB concert/the beach/the closest Urban Outfitters]. I didn’t have time to think about it, I just slipped on my Birkenstock Bostons™️ and ran out the door.”
Birkenstock Bostons were also the shoes I felt CERTAIN would help me win the affection of my kind-of-crunchy, gateway-stonery high school crush (who, in my hazy memory, looks exactly like Jeremiah from “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and I don’t want to be proven otherwise) (just kidding, I couldn’t help myself and googled him and shattered the illusion, fuck). By the time I proudly showed up to school wearing my knock-off of the knock-off Birkenstocks, it happened to be the summer after he had turned preppy and was wearing the ubiquitous brown doc martens prep staple (the right size, presumably) and I felt sure my footwear was the reason he only wanted to be friends.
I like to think my relationship with fashion has evolved to a healthier place — I mean, I rarely leave my house so when I say I bought the ugly Birkenstocks for myself and no one else, I mean it. There’s just something about the power of pressing “purchase” on a thing that tortured me so much as a youth. Consumerism, baby!
Other things healing my inner child:
“Central Places” by Delia Cai: this novel so relatably tackles the idea of returning to your hometown — a place that doesn’t feel like home, but transforms you into the insecure mess you were as a teenager which, sadly, kind of does feel like a version of home. Out January 2023.
"This Time Tomorrow” by Emma Straub: Time travel, teenage nostalgia, the idea of being a little bit nicer to your parents if you had the chance… the parent, former teenager, and time-loop-curious reader in me ate this one up. In this book, the character’s father is dying, and Straub wrote it heavily based on her own father — who ended up dying just a few weeks ago.
Scented pencils: I found these scented pencils in Paris (please read that in the most insufferable voice you can muster) and was suddenly transported to somewhere just as exciting: an Embassy Suites on a service road overlooking Interstate 10, where I had a slumber party for my 14th-ish birthday and received a perfume scented pen from Victoria’s Secret. Such good vibes. I had to buy a pencil.
Good ice: one of the things I miss the most about the south (where my inner child still lives) is the abundance of what we called good ice or “Sonic ice” but apparently we’re now calling nugget ice?! And making in fancy machines that influencers hawk on Prime Day?! I don’t have the counter space for that, so MY version of telling you to buy a nugget ice maker is to tell you to go to a Sonic near you (somehow they have perfected good ice) and buy a bag of their ice (or find yourself a husband who works at a place with a giant Good Ice machine and brings you home insulated bottles of the stuff.)
A mood ring: In April we went to LA and stopped at the La Brea Tar Pits, which have always loomed large in my mind thanks to the classic film My Girl 2 (1994) where Vada goes to LA and meets a cute boy who pretends to drop her mood ring in the tar pits. While my husband was marveling over the history and geologic importance of the tar and my daughter was whining because she was hungry, I was thinking to myself how badly I needed a mood ring. Weeks later I found one at a local boutique and I’m here to report that it’s perfect, makes me think of Vada every day, and feels like one of those random things my daughter might find in 30 years and say “omg I remember when my mom used to wear this ugly ring” and wear it ironically as an adult. This is how I make my fashion choices these days — which feels slightly healthier than whether my crush will invite me to winter formal.