Your fringe is parted perfectly down the centre and pinned back with two minuscule butterfly clips. You weep slowly into your Furby as Radiohead’s Creep blasts through your smelly sticker adorned Walkman. You’re wearing a pair of maharishi pants, four leather chokers, and some Sketchers. All in black. The year is 1997, and you are holding a funeral for your Tamagotchi.
Remember them? Those little screens of giant pixels forming artificial animals that you fed and watered via two tiny buttons designed for fingers much smaller than yours? Those ones that you forgot about completely when the Pokemon cards came out? Yes? Well, they’re back, and you have another chance to prove your inability to keep anything other than yourself alive. No, I didn’t know cacti could die either.
Fortunately there are some 90s trends that it’s ok to let go of. Some fads to forget. Some things that deserve the same fate as your past and future Tamagotchis.
One leg rolled up, one leg rolled down
Are the gale force winds blowing so directly perpendicular to the direction you’re facing that you only need to insulate one side? Did the swinging action of your leg as you hooned home on your foldable scooter slowly nudge one cuff down centimetre by centimetre?
There is no explanation to the whole one-leg-rolled-up-one-leg-rolled-down look. It is uncomfortable and awkward and merely leads to you feeling a little bit lopsided, like when you step on a crack in the pavement with one foot and need to step on a different crack with the other to even it out a bit. But 90s playground rules dictate that if you step on a crack you break your mother’s back, so you shouldn’t ever do that anyway. Like you shouldn’t ever wear just one trouser leg rolled up.
Those Oakley sunglasses you stole from your dad
Cast your mind back: you’re reclining on your family’s pleather La-Z-Boy, channel surfing between Friends and Fresh Prince, and suddenly — what’s that? A frog? In the wild? A spritely David Attenborough narrating a documentary on the technicolour toads of Minneapolis? Oh no, that’s just a middle-aged golfer donning the bug eyed plastic monstrosities christened ‘Oakleys.’ Anyway, the moral of that story is that they were pretty fucking ugly in the 90s already, so let’s not bring them back now.
Shag bands
The rules: if your shag band snaps, you have to do whatever the colour corresponds to with whoever snapped it. The acts in question spanned the euphemistic sexual gamut, from ‘love bite’ to ‘going all the way.’ Except everyone was prepubescent, so there was never actually any shagging. It’s essentially a stack of ugly rubbery rings that leave a zebra pattern on your cheek when you sleep on your arm.
Tips more frosted than a Bake Off showstopper
Don’t get me wrong, I am quite thrilled to say I was alive to witness a time when it was totally cool to look like this. But, baby, Bye, Bye, Bye.
Bindis on white people
Gwen, I’m sorry, but you’re partially to blame for the bindi obsession. We all loved your music and you undoubtedly convinced many of us we could be popstars. But we’ve let go of that dream long ago, and everyone should let go of the bindis. It’s cultural appropriation, it’s not cool and it’s 2017 already. If you do really want to adorn your skin with questionable and offensive accoutrements, get a temp tattoo of a unicorn.