040. STYLE SUBCULTURES: Early 00s TV Moms
This week, I fell down the most delightful internet rabbit hole. Prompted by the last few weeks’ discussions about finding style inspiration outside of social media and following what feels good, I turned to my love for TV from the early aughts. I am addicted. Specifically to teen shows. Specifically to those about rich people behaving like a*sholes. There are very few things that hit my indulgence threshold better than these. Last September, I sustained a severe fracture to my foot after falling down some stairs and, from being prescribed several months of home-bound rest, I lost the ability to do my favourite things like dinners out with friends and my daily walks around Hyde Park. After two weeks of my new idle routine, my mental health was flailing. I needed something to break the continuum of days spent at home writing in my small apartment and started watching Gilmore Girls every evening. I had been too young to watch when it first aired in 2000 and it eluded me to watch it in the years since. It took a while to get over the sappiness (and the sometimes grossly inappropriate references) but somewhere halfway through the first season it became a warm blanket of comfort to numb my overactive mind at the end of each day. I am Team Jess, in case you were wondering.
Over the years, I have gone back to shows like these for comfort and familiarity and I think a great deal of my fascination comes from the clothes. I am mesmerised by the so-bad-it’s-good quality of early ‘00s fashion. I wanted to explore it in the context of those conversations about what constitutes personal taste.
This week, I listened and read several interviews with the stylists, costume designers, and supervisors who worked on these shows and enjoyed discovering that each of them had widely different processes. In conversation with Rachel Bilson and Melinda Clarke, who play Summer and Julie on The O.C., Nicole Chavez, who was the stylist on Season 1, explained that the vision for costumes on this specific show was for it to become the pinnacle of 2003 fashion. ‘Styling Of The Moment’ as she calls it. The result, as anyone who watched it will recall, is a show that feels like a time capsule that transports viewers back to that era. The fashion we now refer to as Y2K. By contrast, the styling direction for a show like Gossip Girl was to create timeless characters and to push the boundaries of what defined fashion at that point in time. On Jessica Szorh’s podcast (who brilliantly played the insufferable Vanessa), Eric Daman, costume designer for the original show and the recent reboot, explained that Chuck’s character was a trailblazer for cisgender men dressing in bolder, more colorful and sophisticated fashion.
If you’re also a fan, I recommend listening to the episodes referenced throughout this newsletter as they offer up delicious tidbits of BTS anecdotes related to the most iconic outfits from the shows. After listening, I put together capsules inspired by the aesthetic of some of the characters with the most iconic wardrobes: Julie Cooper from The O.C, Lorelai Gilmore from Gilmore Girls, and Lily Van Der Woodsen from Gossip Girl. I hope they inspire you, whether you recognise your personal taste in one of them, or whether it moves you to do something similar with your favourite TV characters. I also share some insights gathered from these interviews that left me wondering whether, perhaps, romanticizing our lives a little might be just the help we need to find our personal style.
Have a beautiful Sunday. (And be careful when walking down stairs).
L x
Julie Cooper
They say you remember how people make you feel. When putting together these