The Observer Music Monthly has dedicated their latest issue to ‘teens’, a category that I technically can no longer apply to myself or can I? According to Miranda Sawyer’s article ‘Everything Changes’:
"Anyhow, young adult, like middle youth and kidulthood, is an attempt to define this blurring of the divide between child and grown-up. Everyone’s a teenager now. Adults are staying younger for longer, and kids are growing up earlier."
If this is true, then these Ten Teen Looks (mostly applicable to Britain only) that Maude Churchill (an 18 year old guest teen editor from Leeds) has put together applies not just to the 13-20 yr old gap that I would call ‘teen years’ but to the people like myself as well who perhaps blindly extend their youth by subscribing to these ‘looks’. So I thought this might be of interest to not just the teens but also that 20’s or even 30’s generation that hold onto their youth to varying degrees of success. Do read the article for some amusing descriptions of each Look. Hopefully if you fall into one of those brackets, you won’t take too much offense at Churchill’s sometimes disdainful tone.
Of course, being the Music Monthly, the looks are accordingly music genre-led which is very much true for the teens that I observed yesterday when I was unknowingly surrounded by them at the O2 Wireless Festival (always nice to feel the weight of your years…). You have…
1) The Punk // 2) The Nu Raver
3) The Hardcore Kid // 4) The Scene Kid
5) Emo Skater // 6) Indie Boho
7) The Scranner // 8) Wannabe Wag
9) The Goth // 10) Skinhead
I can honestly say I never fell into any of those categories which isn’t some kind of triumphant declaration as quite simply, those categories by and large didn’t really exist when I was a teen and of course now, I’m too far gone to be subscribing to any of those. I can say that London seems to be overun with 2), 3), 4) and 6) – well, the places I go to and they probably are the looks I vaguely like from an aesthetic point of view even though I myself, don’t necessarily wear them in the orthodox way. As I have always been a firm believer in diversity of style and expression of style that is intrinsically atuned to you as an individual, categorising a population of teens in this way is a little irritating for me. Yet I have to concede that they hold some truth and sadly as I was walking amongst tribes of nu-ravers and scene kids yeterday at Hyde Park, reality confirmed it all for me. There is however I think a bigger scope in diversity certainly, compared to when I was a teenager which is pretty reassuring.
It’s all very well me commenting as someone not in that teen age bracket anymore, so by all means, teens, shed some light on these Teen Looks. Complete tosh or excruciatingly true?