I recently had a mammoth ‘gram sesh which segued into a good few hours on Twitter and Tumblr… and I realised while in this internet-trance that a good proportion of what I was looking at was 00s nostalgia. My favourite accounts @Popculturediedin2009, @Shesvague and @partylikeits07 are all in the business of posting photos from the most iconic celebrities of the early 2000s. I’m not interested in what Emma Stone is up to today, I want to know which club Tara Reid fell out of in 2003, or the legendary feud between Paris and Lindsay ‘Firecrotch’ Lohan.
A quick poll of my friends shows that, they too, are all obsessed with the celebs of yesteryear. But why? Why are we all living so defiantly in the past? Well, firstly, these are the images of our formative years – we all came of age in the millennium – so Nicole, Paris, Micha and Hilary were our teen queen idols. And they ran things. Heat magazine was at its zenith and tabloid journalism was reaching new highs/lows never to be seen again. The celebs of today are way too savvy for too much scandal, I mean, look at Selena Gomez and Zac Efron – both willingy went into rehab with little fanfare and seem to be on the straight and narrow. Compare that with Lindsay Lohan’s repeated stints in rehabilitation facilities, stints that resulted in nothing more than more column inches( you can not tell me LL is sober).
These girls were salacious, young, rich and bad. DUIs and jail sentences were the norm, alongside eating disorders and drug abuse – and yet with the help of super-stylist Rachel Zoe millions of tweens idolised bad girls like Lohan and Hilton. Their impact on fashion at the time was revelatory, put the right tee on the right girl and it would sell out in an instant. Remember this is pre-Instagram, so their levels of power and influence were pretty astounding.
Perhaps another reason why we’re all clamouring to relive these halcyon days is because a lot of this coverage we never even saw at the time, unless you happened to pick up the exact copy of whatever magazine published that story. There was no internet to see images of your faves on demand, so now we get to go over that period with a fine tooth comb thanks to the sleuths like @popculturediedin2009 who are unearthing all this fire from 2007. It seems rude not to pay attention.
Of course any form of nostalgic past-time is a symptom of a refusal to grow the f*ck up. I hold my hands up, I’m in a prolonged state of adolescence and I want my free time activities to reflect that. If I can’t get a mortgage, then no way am I going to act like a real adult. So tabloid tales of Speidi, LC and Mischa Barton rehashed is where I’m at right now. And I’m okay with that.
If you’d like to take a trip down memory lane then check out these Instagram/Twitter accounts.
https://twitter.com/partylikeits07
https://www.instagram.com/shesvague/
Chez Shez 