🆕 Never Post! The Disappearance of Tween Fashion [Archive Pull]

Originally published in our first episode I'm Mad, You're Mad, We're All Mad Here on January 31, 2024, enjoy Georgia's segment talking to Professor Elizabeth Wissinger about how the social internet helped erase an entire fashion demographic — namely, tween fashion for girls.

Listen to the original episode here: https://www.neverpo.st/never-post-2/

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Find Elizabeth Wissinger:

• Her website
• This Year's Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voicemail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

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Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Hey, everybody. It's producer Georgia. This week, we're bringing you an archive pull from the Never Post Vault, and we're pulling my 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 Fashion for Girls, upheld by brands such as Limited Too and Delia's. Now, girls aged nine to 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.

I 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 Depop. But on Depop, someone my age, 32, is much more likely to try to buy a pair of now vintage shoes from Delia's than anyone else.

So has this shift away from the carousel of trends made space for the tween girl demographic to begin again? Not really. The closest thing to a tween centered style I've seen lately isn't even being worn by real kids. It's being sported by American Girl Dolls. This year, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the brand, American Girl debuted a modern era version of their original six historical dolls.

These girls have ditched their petticoats and nineteenth century lace up shoes for polka dot dresses and white sneakers. 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 miniskirt, 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.

But 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. They're online. Even after the empire of cottagecore 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.

Okay. Alright. So I'm just gonna 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 in my grade dress just like their moms is what I found. They all dress like, I don't mean this as an insult. If I could live this life, I would, but, kinda 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 their moms always wear Lululemon.

That's a conversation between a friend of the show, Kevin, and his daughter, who's 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'll be 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. It 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 eighth grade history class in h to t Chico's, it's unimaginable. When I was in that nine to twelve tween age bracket back in the mid two thousands, I had my own ecosystem of fashion that felt like it was made specifically for me, and that's because it was. Limited Too, Claire's, Justice, Libby Lou, 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 ten 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 wanna paint you a picture. The inside of a limited two was this color coded, candy scented, fantasy world for girls. Everything was blue and green or pink and orange. The 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 to was just one of a bunch of places that looked like this. Growing up, there was even a tween home goods 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 p g rated fashion. But now obviously, things are very different.

Limited two left the mall in 2010. Libby Lou declared bankruptcy, then Claire's, 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 know where to go.

There seems to no longer be a market for specifically preteen and teenage gals. Everybody keeps talking about how it's 10 and 12 year olds in Sephora and Ulta, 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 like 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. Nowhere to go.

What this tells me is that when it comes to fashion, the tween demographic isn't really important to brands anymore. So what is?

My name is professor Elizabeth Wissinger. I am a professor of sociology at the CUNY Community College of Borough Manhattan 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 a very small, very 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, you had to be a fashion model or somebody who was going to the shows who might be photographed outside the tents or 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, on Instagram or YouTube or more recently TikTok, especially TikTok.

Get ready with me for my Barbie shoot.

Get ready with me for picture day.

Welcome to a day in my life as a full time content creator. I woke up this morning and got ready just threw on a cute little tracksuit, made my bed.

What to wear when you don't know

what to wear. So first, we need concealer. The opportunity to create an online presence for yourself, market yourself, become a brand in 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 acclaim.

So if you have a phone and an Internet connection, you could, in theory, start establishing yourself as a tastemaker. 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 it so flattens out the individual inflection of individualized personalities in terms of how the public interprets them.

It'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 wanna 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 wanna 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 to limit your marketing to a specific age group now than it was then. So if you're a teen and you're showing how to construct a look, if you wanna go viral with your post, you don't wanna 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 gonna 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 they're athleisure 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 two thousands. 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 wanna be? It'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, turtlenecks 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, like, where you shop, when you shop, how you shop, what you buy. Like, all of the that information is being processed all the time. So the Lululemon people, the kids and the moms might be just inside a very narrowly defined algorithmic space that markets very specifically to that income bracket, geographic location, 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 handpicked 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, rinse 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 athleisure in a major way.

I, like, was scrolling on TikTok, and I see, like, 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 twenty years older. I was kinda like, wow.

This is real. I don't know.

Thanks to Kevin and his daughter for sharing their thoughts and thanks to professor Elizabeth Wissinger for her fascinating insight on all of this. You can read more of her work online 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 voicemail. 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.

That is the archival episode we have for you today. If you'd like to listen to the original upload with news and interstitials, you can find a link in the show notes. Never Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this segment, please consider becoming a member at neverpo dot s t. You can gain access to an ad free member feed while helping us keep the show going.

Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rignetta. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.