Almost 20 years ago, nine young actresses gathered for a now infamous Vanity Fair cover shoot. The pull-out spread would be something of a magnum opus for the magazine: a stocktake on the best and brightest teen entertainers of the era, those for whom fame was already second-nature. For a publication whose hard-hitting journalism had long catered to a very specific consumer, it felt radical. Now, with the intention that its pages be ripped from their spine and taped to bedroom walls, Vanity Fair was embracing zine culture. And that, in turn, was tween culture.
“I remember wanting to dress like Mary-Kate and Ashley,” says Ivana Rihter, a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist and co-host of the celebrity nostalgia podcast, (UN)COVER GIRL. “I wanted Miley‘s hair, and especially related to Lizzie McGuire. If you turned to TV, it felt like being 16 years old was the peak of life.”
Long before TikTok choreography or Instagram selfies, Vanity Fair’s 2003 “It’s Totally Raining Teens” portfolio served as one of the sole access points for millions of tweens to their idols. The likes of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan were probed for their celebrity crushes, favourite lip glosses and the “number of Juicy Couture outfits” (“No joke, probably 25,” revealed Mandy Moore) they owned. In-book, lesser stars Emma Watson and Solange Knowles also made an appearance. The publication had learned, along with Hollywood and every major label music exec, that pre-teens controlled the purse strings of their parents. And that was a market worth exploring.
“By the early 2000s, Disney was pivotal in creating a tween audience through the Disney Channel,” says Dr. Djoymi Baker, a lecturer in Cinema Studies at RMIT University. “[Other young actresses] sang about youthful troubles, but were intended for a general film audience. Hilary Duff and Miley Cyrus, by contrast, were pitched as stars for tween girls more specifically. This also meant marketing music sales, but the early 2000s saw an acceleration of multiple tie-in products for tween girls.”
Today, the discourse around tween culture has dissipated, and what has emerged in its place, according to millennials at least, appears to be unprecedented maturity of younger generations. While adolescence once looked messy — foundation lines, flat-ironed hair and eyebrow-raising outfits — the next generation is indiscernible from, well, adults. Bottomless social media feeds double as instruction manuals for self-presentation, and, when it comes to romantic or parental interaction, self-preservation. Disagreements are articulated with phrases like “gaslighting” and generational success characterized as “nepotism” — terms no one currently pushing 30 would have been familiar with at 13.
Now, in lieu of yesteryear’s wildly marketable teen idols — the likes of Mary-Kate and Ashley whose fingerprints dusted Target lines, book series and summer blockbusters — there are influencers with a mandate to appeal to as many audiences as the algorithm will allow. It’s difficult to point now to a Disney or Nickelodeon supernova, as many play second-fiddle to the likes of Bella Poarch or Charli D’Amelio, TikTok stars determined to break into the mainstream. As for the teens, or recent teens, who’ve amassed enormous fanbases (read: 18-year-old Millie Bobby Brown), they seem years older than they are.
“Pre-teens and teens today have on-demand access to celebrities and influencers, leading them to strive for unattainable goals and ultimately, feel discontent in their bodies, clothes, abilities, relationships and more,” says Aja Chavez, Executive Director of Adolescent Services at Mission Prep. “It has them experiencing ideas that they will never be good enough, or enough in general. They lose their own internal sense of identity, intuition and authenticity. Their true selves get lost in the ‘shoulds’, thinking they will experience belonging if only they could replicate what they observe.”
Consequently, the unending “shoulds” are not only eliminating the barrier between tweens and celebrities, but the stage between child and adulthood in today’s world. Puberty is anxiety-inducing enough, argues Ivana, without pretending it doesn’t exist.
“Now, we can see where celebrities are eating, shopping and living and that can make it feel like our parasocial relationship to them is closer than ever, even though we know that what they show us is highly curated,” she says. “I can’t imagine having been on these apps from eight or nine years old and how that would have impacted the way I saw myself. I was not elegant or mysterious, and so many of these early pre-teen icons celebrated the awkwardness that comes with adolescence.”
It’s perhaps the absence of this ‘awkwardness’ that is most startling for those who came of age before social media’s upending of celebrity. As young people’s ‘following’ lists contain more and more adults than those within their age group, their queues for self-styling also mature. It hasn’t helped that the options for tweens have been increasingly limited over the past ten years. Delia’s, a store catering mostly to subteens, was shuttered in 2014 after Forever 21 and H&M — brands catering more towards the modern woman than girl — overtook their market share. In 2018, Claire’s filed for bankruptcy. A staple of mall culture, Claire’s became a conduit for tween self-expression: come to pierce your ears, stay to partake in the ‘buy two, get one free’ jewelry deal.
Then there was Limited Too, formerly owned by Tween Brands, Inc, rebranded to Justice in 2003 to specifically target the pre-teen customer. According to a Limited Too spokesman, Robert Atkinson, the company was instrumental in creating the “tween fashion category,” and in 2007, predicted “tweens of both sexes are expected to account for $13 billion of apparel sales.” Less than a decade later the brand had been sold, with select clothing now sold online and via Amazon.
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It seems the pre-teen market was waning as far back as 2007, ushering in new concerns of kids ‘growing up too fast.’ In a viral Slate article, a writer bemoaned the “rhinestones” adorning every piece of clothing considered by her 11-year-old daughter. Then there were the graphic tees, or as she calls it “Nitwit Wear,” with slogans such as: “I Left My Brain in My Locker” and “Spoiled and Proud of It.” The story’s SEO headline reads, ‘Shopping for clothes that will and won’t make your daughter look like a tramp.’
“The tween girl has always been a culturally unsettling category, in her perceived mix of innocence and burgeoning maturity,” Dr. Baker says. As such, discussions about the potential influence of young stars and concerns around the preservation of tween innocence can be found across numerous decades.”
“Every generation seems to be growing up faster when we reflect on what being a young person’s lived experience was,” Aja adds. “The way this generation shows up is [just] different due to the resources available to them.”
In her research with Dr. Jessica Balanzategui and Dr. Diana Sandars of Melbourne University, Dr. Baker suggests the tween might not only have a longer history than we think, but her cultural relevance might be cyclical.
“The emergence of the tween is most often seen as a 1990s phenomenon. However, back in 1938, a young Judy Garland sang about being ‘in-between’, while by the 1940s there were a range of products — from clothes to makeup — targeted at ‘preteen’ girls.”
If she’s right, we might just be entering a tween-assance, so to speak. Delia’s has been revived via online retailer Doll’s Kill on the strength of online Y2K nostalgia. Claire’s merchandise is now proliferating grocery stores. Juicy Couture has manufactured a return second to none. Mall culture may already be a distant memory, but brands are finding new ways to show up for a market that’s been long-since forgotten.
As for our tween idols, they may have been replaced with a different generation, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Older and wiser, today’s favourites are able to set the boundaries 2003 teen stars could not — navigating the near unlimited access of their fans by controlling their own narrative. The waning necessity of legacy outlets like Vanity Fair to validate stardom means a spread like ‘It’s Raining Teens’ is unlikely to repeat itself, living on instead as cultural canon. Still, that doesn’t mean we’re not nostalgic to go back, back to the beginning.
“I truly miss the good old days and find that teen [content] was far deeper than critics of the time gave them credit for,” Ivana says. “We saw all of humanity and you can’t convince me otherwise.”