You know, 2014. The year that One Direction was touring the world, and Tumblr was the dominant social platform for introverted, big-hearted teens. The year when the only dispatches we got direct from celebrities was via their participation in the Ice Bucket Challenge.
When I experienced the “’90s-does-’70s” trends, it was with the ignorance of the preceding generation. I got the highlights reel, the cliff notes. This time, I’d been there for the inception of the nostalgia so I could see how skewed Gen Z’s perception of 2014 was. I felt compelled to correct them, to let them know I understood the impulse to get emo but that actually they didn’t have it quite right. Thank god I resisted – I’m not cut out to handle the bullying that would’ve inevitably come my way!
The odd thing about homing in on something as niche as 2014 is that it was as highly documented as any other year since the invention of the internet. We were posting our way through it. All the information is still there, blogged over and tweeted about, for anyone interested in seeking it out.
One of the cultural products from the mid-2010s that’s found a new generation of fans in Gen Z viewers is Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls. Her contentious public reputation was so noisy that, for many years, young people didn’t bother to pay her groundbreaking series any mind, assuming it was the vanity project of a cancelled egomaniac.
In many ways, it was the urtext for cringe narcissism storylines by and about privileged white kids. From the moment it premiered in 2012, Girls inspired endless articles about what it did right and got wrong. About why it was problematic and how it was misunderstood. About whether or not Dunham really was the voice of her generation.
More than a decade later, as attempts to copy the Girls formula have emerged and floundered, its distinct quality has only been cast into sharper relief. The enduring appeal is not for “2012” as a vague concept, but of Dunham’s depiction of flailing young adulthood, dicey friendships between people who maybe don’t actually like each other all that much, and a city that you force yourself to live in because you believe it will make you a different/better/cooler person.
Unlike eyebrow shapes and jean waistbands and guitar bands, those things are truly timeless.
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