The Disappearance of Tween Fashion [Archive Pull]

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3:07my first ever segment from the first ever episode of the show. In it, I talked to Professor Elizabeth Wissinger about how the rise of algorithmic online social platforms helped erase an entire demographic of fashion, namely, tween fashion for girls, upheld by brands such as Limited 2 and Delias. Now, girls aged 9-12 don't have a style curated specifically for them. Instead, they dress like their moms. When I first wrote this segment two years ago, micro trends and aesthetics were at their zenith. The latest styles cannibalized each other in a matter of weeks and they had nothing to do with how old you were. If you wanted to dress like an office siren, a mob wife, or anything that could have core attached to the end of it, you could find a mood board that would get you there. But now micro trends have kind of gone out of style.

4:08I don't see the videos I used to see where once a month someone would proudly declare that a new trend was on the horizon. In some ways, we've moved back to the more old school forms of trend predicting where individual types of clothing or accessories are pointed to as the next big thing. Every year has an it shoe or an it bag. Now more than anything, the sign of good style has more to do with how many hours you're willing to spend at the thrift or scrolling through D-pop. But on D-pop, someone my age, 32, is much more likely to try to buy a pair of now vintage shoes from Delias than anyone else. So has this shift away from the carousel of trends made space for the tween girl demographic to begin again? Really? The closest thing to a tween centered style I've seen lately isn't even being worn by real kids.

5:08It's being sported by American Girl Dolls. This year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the brand, American Girl debuted a modern era version of their original six historical dolls. These girls have ditched their pedicotes in 19th century lace-up shoes for polka dot dresses and white sneakers. My favorite doll, Josefina, whose story originally took place in 1824 no longer wears her signature shawl and big red skirt. Now she wears a white button down, a red mini skirt, and little white cowboy boots with flowers on them. She has a tiny leather shoulder bag. And in another fashion landscape, these dolls could be a great representation of what tween fashion looks like, if it still existed. And instead, modern day Josefina just kind of looks like she's wearing a costume. And while young girls might reach for her, tweens aren't really playing with dolls.

6:09They're online. Even after the Empire of Cottage Corps rose and fell, the social internet still has the last say about how fashion trends spread to the masses. And tween fashion, as a demographic, shows no sign of returning. Folks, hello, it's Mike here with an ad. Different from normal ads, though, because this one is interactive. Ooh, I'm going to ask you some questions. You're going to tell me the answers and just like the quiz on the placemat at the diner when you were a kid, we're going to print all the correct responses on the back so that you can check if you were right. Okay, ready? Here goes. Who is Neverpost Supported By? Okay, next question, a little trickier. What sorts of things do you get with membership? Nice, wow, okay, you went for a while there. Next, in addition to ad-free episodes of the show, team chats and various side shows,

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8:17This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Okay. All right. So I'm just going to ask you about what you were talking about the other night. So tell me about that about how some of the kids at your school dressed. Okay. A lot of the girls at my grade dress just like their moms is what I've found. They all dress like, I don't mean this as an insult. If I could live this life, I would, but kind of like a stay at home mom who runs errands all day and goes to the gym whenever she can because both the girls at my school and

9:25their moms always wear a little lemon. That's a conversation between a friend of the show Kevin and his daughter who is 13 years old. And what she's talking about here is this strange thing that seems to be happening. It's like sometimes I'll like see an older woman from behind and I'm like, is that like so and so from my school? No, that is somebody that could be their mom. That just feels so weird to me. And listen, I'm 30 years old. This is a world I'm not a part of anymore, but when I was 13, it would have been mortifying to dress like your mom would also be extremely bizarre. I'm imagining myself arriving at school in a pair of black stretchy capris with a loose knit leopard print sweater and perhaps a decorative beaded necklace like just showing up to

10:26eighth grade history class in H to T. Cheetos. It's unimaginable. When I was in that 9 to 12 tween age bracket back in the mid 2000s, I had my own ecosystem of fashion that felt like it was made specifically for me. And that's because it was limited to clairs, justice, liby-loo, a whole suite of brands whose thing was making clothes and accessories for young girls like me, or frankly, making an entire space for young girls. And over the last 10 years or so, pretty much all of those places disappeared. And I wondered if that had anything to do with what I and Kevin's daughter have noticed happening. I want to paint you a picture. The inside of a limited two was this color-coded candy-centred fantasy world for girls. Everything was blue and green or pink and orange.

11:29The store had a huge light-up pink daisy on the ceiling, and the carpet was this super bright, barney shade of purple. Over by the register, you could buy push pops or baby bottle pops or bubble tape. Famously, you could get your ears pierced, which I did. And limited two was just one of a bunch of places that looked like this. Growing up, there was even a tween home-good store called Dry Ice at the Mall near me, available for all my beaded curtain lava lamp blow-up pink lounge chair needs. That's what made all these brands different. They created a tween look, a tween demographic. Everything there was funky without being offensive or cool in the eyes of an 11-year-old, but not like dangerously cool. This wasn't hot topic or God forbid Spencer's gifts. Nothing at limited two would get you sent to the principal's office. It was PG-rated fashion.

12:31But now, obviously, things are very different. Limited two left the mall in 2010, liby-loo declared bankruptcy, then clairs, then justice. And that was it. No other stores stepped in to take the daisy-clad, hot-pink, plastic blow-up throne of tween fashion. Like I said, I'm not a tween. But even I noticed this. And a lot of other people did, too, especially on TikTok. The 10-year-olds have nowhere to go! They're going to go! That seems to no longer be a market for specifically pre-teen and teenage gals. Everybody keeps talking about how it's 10 and 12-year-olds and so forth and older, but they're not talking about how there's no tween stage of life anymore. Once you turn like 10, 11, 12, you start jumping and doing stuff that you do like at 17, 18 because there's no gap in between because everybody forgot about the fact that kids are children, even as teenagers. No, we're gonna go! What this tells me is that when it comes to fashion, the tween demographic isn't really

13:36important to brands anymore. So what is? My name is Professor Elizabeth Wissinger. I am a Professor of Sociology at the Community College of Burrowman Hatton Community College, BMCC. I am a Professor of Liberal Studies with a concentration in fashion studies at the CUNY Graduate Center of the City University of New York. And I am really interested in how technologies and bodies interact in ways that affect society over time. I talked with Professor Wissinger to understand what had taken the place of the quote-unquote tween brand. And perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a lot going on here and there's a lot of factors at play. But according to Professor Wissinger, it all starts with the rise of the social internet. Before we had Twitter and TikTok and Instagram, changes in fashion were dictated by very small,

14:37very specific set of gatekeepers. You had to be an editor at a fashion magazine or you had to be somebody photographed in a street style blog and prior to blogs that you had to be a fashion model or somebody who was going to the shows who might be photographed outside the tents or a socialite. This meant that the pool of people making decisions was small. And then with the social internet, that power started to shift. You weren't only looking at magazines, you were looking at people online. And Instagram or YouTube or more recently, TikTok, especially TikTok. Get ready with me for my barbecue. Can I do this for a picture? Welcome to a day in my life as a full-time content creator. I woke up this morning and got ready just through on a cute little track suit made my bed. What's your where when you don't know what's where? So first we need concealer. The opportunity to create an online presence for yourself, market yourself, become a brand

15:40in and of yourself became an option. But brands always have associations. They don't have any meaning unless they're connected to other brands out there in the brand universe. So when you're doing self branding, you are using the tools of branding to present a persona that will gain you notoriety or fame or a claim. So if you have a phone and an internet connection, you could, in theory, start establishing yourself as a taste maker. Someone to be taken seriously a person with special and unique ideas about fashion. You can build your own little island around yourself as a voice worth listening to. You can do it. Anyone can do it. Everyone can do it. But that comes with its own problem. A lot of individual voices create kind of like a cacophony that ends up sort of blending into just one loud sound. And so it flattens out the individual inflection of individualized personalities in terms of how the public interprets them.

16:42It's this shaving down of nuance. Everyone is an individual online, but because everyone is unique, no one is. It's a weird tension between wanting to be special and different, but also attractive to a lot of people. It's like you want to appeal to the masses with your individuality, which has been the conundrum of being fashionable since the beginning of fashion, but now it's like on steroids with the fact that everyone can be a fashion influencer if they use these tools. What matters here is bridging that gap between uniqueness and accessibility. A fashion trend should be interesting, which means it should have something new to say or a new take on an old idea, but you don't want to limit your potential audience. And declaring any given trend as a tween style just doesn't seem to make sense anymore, or as Professor Wissinger put it. It seems that it's less lucrative to limit your marketing to a specific age group now than

17:47it was then. So if you're a teen and you're showing how to construct a look, if you want to go viral with your post, you don't want to post, this look is for teens. You want everybody interested in your look. And if you're an older, more mature influencer, you're not going to say, well, these outfits are only good for 50 and older. You may go in as a mature influencer and say, look, I can look like this as a 50 and older, but really you can learn from my look no matter what age you are. That's why you get 13-year-olds dressing like their ATHLEASURE moms. Because the marketing is for as many people as possible. Age-specific trends just don't matter in the way they might have in the 2000s. What does matter is having trends that are appealing and interesting to the widest margin of people regardless of how old they are. So for a girl aged 10 to 12, the question is no longer, what does a tween girl my age dress like? It's just, who do you want to be?

18:48It's more about an aesthetic than anything else. You can be goblin core if you're into collecting little trinkets and wearing brown and green, or maybe you're a coastal grandma, which means you basically dress how Diane Keaton currently dresses, turtle necks and lots of linen. Whatever hyper-specific niche you're looking for, there's a mood board for it. The point is that you're the tastemaker of your specific individual style. Well, you and your algorithm. I mean, there are suites of products that people are identified with in terms of the algorithms that look at where you shop when you shop, how you shop, what do you buy. All of that information is being processed all the time. So the Lululemon people, the kids and the moms might be just inside of very narrowly defined algorithmic space that markets very specifically to that income bracket, geographic

19:50location, that zip code, that private school. Okay. So instead of your age-mattering in regards to fashion trends, it's more about where the algorithm can place you, geographically sure, but also monetarily your race, your aesthetic interests, a whole host of other signifiers, but not necessarily your age. So instead of limited to existing as a Tween Only space, you have trends that are catering to a specific vibe, a specific corner of the algorithmic space that the machine brain of the internet has placed you into based on your measurable qualities. But that has its limits. Sure, the algorithm can give you this extremely curated experience that is hand-picked for you specifically, but if there's just more of a certain kind of content and it becomes inescapable, the more you interact with it, the more the algorithm thinks you like it,

20:55rinse and repeat forever. To put it another way, those kids, Kevin's daughter was talking about. Like, I'm sure their TikTok for you page looks different than mine, but it might not look different from other women my age, who might, I don't know, be into ATHLEASURE in a major way. I was scrolling on TikTok and I see like this girl dancing and then her mom, and they're wearing almost identical outfits, but one was blue and the other one was pink. They looked the same, but one was like 20 years older. I was kind of like, wow, this is real. Thanks to Kevin and his daughter for sharing their thoughts and thanks to Professor Elizabeth Whissinger for her fascinating insight on all of this, you can read more of her work

21:58online and in her book, this year's model, fashion, media and the making of glamour. There's also a part of this story that didn't make it into the episode because I'm kind of still parsing through it. Basically, I think there's something really wonderful about kids being able to create their own fashion identity in this super individual way, but I also think it's weird that middle school girls are being mistaken for their own parents based on the way they dress, and I want to hear what you think about this. How does this strike you? How does it make you feel? Call us and leave us a voice mail, send us a voice memo, write us an email, all of the ways you can get a hold of us are down in the show notes.

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