Nostalgia as midlife muse
How teen magazine dreams shaped my reality (and why I'm finally fulfilling them now)
When I was in junior high, my mom gifted me a subscription to Teen Magazine. A couple years later, I graduated to Seventeen. Each month, I waited for the next issue to arrive in our mailbox, and I would read and re-read it dozens of times, front to back, before the next one came.
One of my favorite spreads featured a young Jennifer Connolly in egregiously-layered tweed, denim and sweaters rolled up at the sleeves. It was the September 1990 issue, after she’d performed in the Rocketeer, a movie I loved as a kid. She was studying theater at Yale, so Seventeen traveled to New Haven to shoot photos of her going about her “normal” daily life. It looked so adult. So independent.
I didn’t just like those pages: I inhabited them. It was as if I stared hard enough, I could will myself into the frame and walk arm-in-arm with Jennifer to class, hang out with friends, study in the local cafe.
Was my life sad or difficult? Nope. I had a lovely childhood in sunny California, surrounded by friends and support. All the same, I wanted to escape—especially into those shots of Ralph Lauren-smothered Ivy Leaguers. Good lord, I wanted IN.
If I couldn’t teleport myself into the photos, I did the next best thing: in 1996, I left home for a leafy, East Coast liberal arts college. I hadn’t bothered applying to Yale (fat chance!) but I did get into Vassar. As a theater major, no less.
But the high-flying life of a plaid-clad coed I’d seen on the pages of Seventeen didn’t manifest for me, despite living on a jewel box of a campus, with its ivy crawling over stone buildings, stained glass windows and brass lamps. Sure, it looked like Hogwarts, but in place of Jennifer Connolly’s tweed were North Face puffer jackets and microfiber flared pants straight out of the Delia’s catalog, which every female there wore like a uniform. There were devastatingly long winters, rejections from directors after multiple auditions, and even more rejections from heavy-lidded flop-haired boys who looked exactly like Timothee Chalamet’s character in Lady Bird.
By the time I left in 2000, my Ralph Lauren magazine dreams were long dormant. But you know what’s great about getting older? Those trends come back around, and this time, I have the cash and cajones to wear Jennifer’s blazers, boots, and button-downs exactly the way I want, when I want. As I do, I find it’s a style that transports easily across the decades and agrees with me, even in midlife, in a way that North Face puffers and flared pants never did.
More nostalgic inspiration from my youth
A trio of transcendent New York City rom-coms from the ‘80s: Tootsie (1982), Romancing the Stone (1984), and Crossing Delancey (1988).
I don’t care for Dudley Moore but the theme from Arthur by Christopher Cross is like a time machine...
…As is the animated Pinball Number Count from Sesame Street. Did you know the singers are the Pointer Sisters?!
I’d pay a lot to have my old Sharp cassette player and Electric Youth perfume (especially because scents tap into the most evocative of senses for me—and because that coiled spritz mechanism is still genius packaging). But the Lock ‘n Roll? I actually still have them, and they continue to work great.
My inner child's prized possessions
Next time: Jennifer Cox and I talk women and rage
I’m delighted to host a recorded video chat with Jennifer Cox, psychotherapist and author of The Times and Sunday Times Self-Help Book of the Year, Women Are Angry: Why Your Rage Is Hiding And How To Let It Out for the next installment of the newsletter. She is co-founder of the global Women Are Mad mental health platform, and hosts the hit podcast Women Are Mad. And because I get mad sometimes (like really, really mad), I have questions.
Until then,
Your friend,
You wear it so well.
When I stare into these seventeen pics, I get a really specific kind of nostalgia that I cannot name. Thanks for memory lane. Mega bonus style points on thrift and handmade. Wow. Might need to find electric youth on ebay just so I can smell it and feel that corner of the brain.