How it started --> How it's going
My journey in vintage teen magazines
I had my first baby in the fall of 2014. It was hard. (Babies are hard!)
During the nights, as I was trying to feed and rock my colicky girl to sleep, my mind would wander. Things can get *dark* when it’s three in the morning and you’re functioning on an hour of broken sleep. My mind would burrow into the deepest crevasses in my brain and pull up memories I hadn’t realized I’d stored.
One night, it pulled up a fashion spread from an old issue of TEEN Magazine. Just, right there, in front of my eyes: colored denim, dangly earrings, bathing suits for every body.
I remembered the entire issue.
And…well…you can read the whole story here, on a piece I wrote for Hello Giggles.
When the pandemic hit, that same craving for comfort, for nostalgia, overtook me again. Back I went to eBay. I scoured the markets for the issues I remembered, this time branching out to SEVENTEEN and YM and SASSY. And soon, Teen Magazine Museum was born.
On my Instagram, I look back at vintage teen magazines, pulling out my favorite pages and trying to set the context for what teens were living through at that time. Here in this newsletter, I’ll do the same, but I’ll also spotlight some of you, the readers who have just as much love for these old rags as I do. Because these magazines? They formed us, in lots of ways — good and bad. And we deserve to unpack what they meant to us, and to both celebrate and criticize them.
Hope you enjoy, and stay tuned for more.
Toodles and Caboodles,
