Well, if you ask people who are in their 40s like myself today, they would probably answer absolutely YES!
Isn’t though, the decade that you spend your teenage years and early youth always the best? The years that everything seemed possible, the future looked bright and we were feeling invincible?
Opening the time capsule of the 90s, my scattered memories tinted in sepia take me to an era which a drive in your father’s car towards the seaside with 5 friends squeezed inside, listening to R.E.M. was qualifying as an awesome adventure… and most of the times it was…
An era which face value and social success was directly linked to the number people who worked in clubs you knew by first name… The point in time when clubs were big, the nights were long and exiting, and Melissa Etheridge, Backstreet Boys and Red Hot Chili Peppers were around!
An era before the reign of the internet, when Sunday nights were always cinema nights and groups of friends were chatting while queuing for tickets to watch Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Jurassic Park, The Matrix….
Do they make movies like these any more?
...and at the same time graduations, first interviews, first paychecks…first serious relationships.
And of course the fashion! Any reference to the 90s would be incomplete without mentioning the bright colors, the logo mania, the slip dresses, the frayed jeans, the chokers, the combat boots and of course fashion’s number one statement piece THE SUNGLASSES. The super small 90’s sunglasses in all colors and shapes! An outfit was simply plain without them…
A decade that was a breeding ground of diversified fashion styles, which due to the absence of Instagram we had to “follow” our fashion icons from the hit series “Friends” in every episode so to avoid style disasters…
Scattered flashbacks, mixed memories and so many feelings… “Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable” according to the social critic Christopher Lasch.
Yes, we can no longer reproduce the exact same feelings of that decade. Why should we in any case? Life has many more gifts to offer!
However a glimpse of myself in my Jean Paul Gaultier sunglasses while listening to “Loosing My Religion” while driving, always brings a smile in my face.
Posted by Vasiliki Papageorgiou