What It was Like to Be a Teen in the 2000’s Part 1

It’s been 20 years since the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000. I was 13 years old. Suddenly, I was living in the decade that science fiction movies had speculated about for years. It was supposed to be the era of flying cars and the cure for cancer. Instead, my generation and I straddled the century built on the industrial revolution and the one about to kick the digital age into high gear. Here’s what it was like to be a teen in the 2000’s. Part 1 of 2.

Influenced by magazines

It typically takes a few years for a new decade to come into its own. However, in the year 2000, everyone was quick to embrace the idea that it was a new millennium. Albums released at the end of 1999 and the early 2000’s often had a millennium-themed title. Metallic-colored outfits showed up on clothing racks to try to replicate a futuristic look. It was hard to keep up with what was trendy. So, I turned to Seventeen Magazine to help keep me up-to-date.

I received the first issue of my first subscription of Seventeen in December 1999. It featured Drew Barrymore on the cover promoting Never Been Kissed. This magazine told me everything I needed to know about the teen world.

• Recommended acne products.
• The biggest hit songs of the month.
• How to take the SAT’s.
• Embarrassing stories that other girls have have lived to tell about.
• A major focus on eating disorders in between ads featuring stick-thin models.
• What the members of Destiny’s Child were currently wearing.

Did this mirror what I saw in school? It was an amplified version, but yes. We were all influenced by what we read in magazines and saw on TV. It may seem limiting compared to today’s resources, but it created a collective understanding of what was popular and what we should emulate.

Room decor

Once I had read my latest issue of Seventeen cover to cover, I would then flip through it again and cut out all of the photographs and ads featuring my favorite celebrities. My walls were covered with magazine pictures of my favorite movies and musicians in every size and shape.

As I grew older, I began to condense my magazine cutouts onto bulletin boards. I never did part with them completely. This bulletin board pictured above exists as the last remaining artifact of how my bedroom walls used to look.

Recently, I looked up Seventeen Magazine to see who was on their latest issue. I discovered that since 2018, the magazine is almost exclusively online. Only special issues are printed and are put up for sale on newsstands only. Not surprising, but without magazine subscriptions, I wonder how teens, especially teen girls, decorate their walls.

2000’s Fashions

A friend of mine once called me a “skater girl” because I wore a hoodie everyday in high school. Skateboarding and snowboarding were incredibly popular in the 2000’s. If you couldn’t skateboard for real, then you at least did tricks on finger boards in study hall.

The skater look was a safe look for both boys and girls. That’s probably why I gravitated toward it. It was a comfortable, low maintenance look that helped me to blend in.

You just paired your favorite jeans with Nikes, Adidas, Sketchers, or Vans and layered your favorite pop punk band shirts with a dark-colored hoodie, and you were ready for school. If the girls wanted to get a little more daring with the skater look, they showed up to school in a tank top and one of their dad’s ties, emulating Avril Lavigne.

Being a poor kid, my jeans were usually the Kohl’s brand, Mudd. They were wide at the bottom which we called “flared.” I even carried around Mudd purses for most of my high school years. Then, I’d buy plain shirts to wear under my one-to-three hoodies (yes I sometimes wore three hoodies to school) or band t-shirts from the clearance racks at Spencer’s gifts, FYE, or at souvenir shops when I went to the beach.

Other styles

For the goth kids, black became their signature color. Paired with jet black hair dye, generously applied black eyeliner, bracelets, belts, and chokers with spikes or squared pieces of metal, and heavy chains worn around the neck or belt loop, the 2000’s goth look was complete. However, the intimidating look was only skin deep. The goth kids typically spoke and acted like any other kid in class. They only looked like they sacrificed rabbits in the woods after school.

For the more popular kids, colorful outfits with low cut jeans and high cut tops were the style for girls. Teachers used to tease them about the free advertising they were providing to Abercrombie and Fitch, Aeropostale, and Old Navy.

We all wore jean shorts that were too short for the dress code, but teachers typically looked the other way when they learned that you couldn’t get jean shorts any longer than the length we were wearing them. Capri pants also came and went every few years. The boys wore jeans that were two sizes too big and had made an art out of being able to wear them as low as possible and walk without them falling down to their ankles.

The girls smelled like cucumber melon, and the boys reeked of Axe body spray. Both boys and girls painted their nails, and accessories from Claire’s and Spencer’s Gifts were worn with pride. Hot Topic and Hollister didn’t appear at my local mall until my late teens.

MTV junkie

So, besides magazines, how did we know what was cool? We watched MTV. Being a nerd, people used to ask me if I went home and watched PBS all day. But the truth was, I was an MTV junkie.

In the 2000’s, MTV was a mix of music videos, music-themed shows, reality shows, game shows, and edgy cartoons for teens and adults.  Everyday after I got home from school, I would crash on the couch, start my homework, and watch TRL (Total Request Live hosted by Carson Daily) to see the top 10 videos of the day. They would play a diverse mix of pop, rock, and rap music.

Afterwards, they would play gimmicky shows like Making The Band, FANatic, and Made.  Then, they would branch out with less music centered and more music featured shows like Daria, Cribs, and Celebrity Death Match.

The Osbournes

While The Real World and Road Rules were popular, I had no interest in reality shows until the The Osbournes premiered. The Osbournes quickly became the show to watch. I wanted to be fashionable like Kelly with her bright hair and tough but girly attire and headstrong like Jack who, like me, knew that people just didn’t understand us, and we were bitter about it.

I kept my school work in Osbournes folders and stayed up late to watch the latest episode each week. MTV was ahead of its time in terms of binge watching, and they would typically play a marathon of Osbournes reruns which I would watch all day.

Unfortunately, they also marked the beginning of the end of MTV as a music channel as reality TV took over, and singers were replaced with teen moms and young adults who lived in New Jersey. This always led me to wonder, did younger audiences really think this was better than music videos and countdown lists, or did they just eat what was put in front of them? Either way, the only relics of the MTV of the past are my YouTube playlist and my Blink-182 compilations that I recorded on two video tapes which were later transferred to DVDs.

2000’s Movies

Speaking of recording shows, video tapes were starting to be replaced by DVD’s in the early 2000’s. My family got its first DVD player in the Christmas of 2001. Our first three DVD’s were Shrek, Rush Hour 2, and Miss Congeniality. The transition was slow as most of the movies we owned were taped from TV. Slowly, we replaced them with the clear picture and sound of a DVD.

Renting movies from the video store was big deal back then as well. Whether you were hanging out at home or going to a sleep over at your friend’s house, a trip to the video store was usually common practice. Many were built into grocery stores. So, you could pick up snacks and a movie all in one stop.

Going to the video store felt like going out, even if that’s all you were doing that weekend. You probably didn’t have any idea of what you were going to rent when you got there. You might spend as much as an hour in there scoping out the new releases and reading the backs of boxes that you knew you’d never rent. Or you knew you wanted to rent the latest Nic Cage or American Pie movie but then searched behind each cover to find that they were all out of stock. So, you had to make a plan B.

The video stores were quick to start replacing VHS tapes with DVD’s. The DVD’s came in wide screen and full screen formats. Chances are, you started the year 2000 owning a boxy TV shaped like a perfect square and ended the decade with a flat, widescreen TV, likely twice the size of your old one.

Teen movies

Thanks to John Hughes, teen movies had been an established genre for as long as I had existed. Like most teens, I developed an interest in horror in the late 90’s. These horror films typically featured teen idols. And if you like an actor in one film, you tend to seek out their other work.

This led me to teen comedies starring comedy staples such as Jason Biggs, Julia Stiles, and Kirsten Dunst. They were colorful, energetic stories that depicted an exaggerated version of high school life where everyone drove expensive cars, wore the latest fashions, and learned choreographed dances for the prom.

What made them relatable was their depiction of high school cliques, the pressures to get into a good college, the familiar soundtracks, and the characters’ desire to find the perfect boy/girlfriend. They got the happy endings you wanted and lived the exciting lives that you weren’t living. What they lacked in substance and diversity, they made up for in entertainment.

Mallrats

When my friends and I went out together, we would typically head for the mall. Malls may be closing left and right, but in the 2000’s, they were the epitome of the teen hangout.

We’d buy orange chicken or ice cream from the food court before making our way from store to store. We’d root through the Pez dispensers at the WB store, play with the nebula balls in the Discovery stores, scoop $8 worth of Jelly Bellies into bags from the candy store, comb through the CD’s at FYE, and giggle at the X-rated birthday cards at Spencer’s Gifts.

Sometimes we’d go to the mall to see a movie. I happily sat through two showings of Orange County when two different friends asked me to see it with them on different weekends.

When I was seventeen, I took my 13-year-old sister to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which was rated R. I had my driver’s license to prove it, but all the ticket taker did was ask if I was 17, and she gladly sold me two tickets without batting an eye at our obvious age gap.

To be continued in part 2

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