Tonight I am going to a festival where the theme is Y2K, and getting dressed for it has made me wonder how much of what I remember is actually the year 2000 and how much is the serious business of being a thirteen-year-old girl.
I grew up in the South East of England and at thirteen the high street was our internet. AOL chat was just around the corner but for now it was Mark One, Bay Trading Co, Debenhams and the Sunday market for everything else. The bus station was the beating heart of the town centre, where boy racers would circuit and I could never quite catch any one’s eye.
I was endorsing brands like Morgan et Toi and The Gap despite having no money. The only £5 I had to my name was already assigned to my Vodafone top-up voucher, which required going into a newsagent and asking for one, usually with a bit of attitude attached. Mobile phones were impressive, but not nearly as impressive to me as the arrival of trainer socks. I remember fake snakeskin backless loafers, Capri pants, or pedal pushers as we called them, Adidas popper pants, and Kickers, which by then were the only really acceptable school shoe.
Hair was also an extremely serious matter. Straighteners hadn’t reached us yet, but we had crimpers, hair clips and those two carefully selected pieces of hair at the front, hair sprayed into submission. My eyebrows were plucked into the obligatory thin lines. Mine were naturally fair, as were my eyelashes, which I hated. Once I discovered mascara I couldn’t go back.
Eyeshadow was bold, blue and metallic and went all the way to the eyebrows. The scent was Exclamation! perfume or Impulse body spray from Superdrug. Versace Blue Jeans smelled impossibly sophisticated to me back then. I would read the Argos catalogue hoping someday somebody might buy me jewellery with my birthstone, purple amethyst.
There was an under-18s disco called Kaos. Of course spelt with a K and many of the songs I now associate with that time came from there.
I was desperate to be older, at the time I thought this was because older girls had better clothes, went clubbing and knew what to do with eyeliner. Looking back, I think there was rather more to it than that.
By thirteen I had been living with my older sister for a year. She was in her early twenties and partied most weekends, which often left me responsible for my eighteen-month-old nephew, Aidan. I was terrified of being alone with him overnight because nobody had taught me what to do if he woke and wouldn’t settle. Y2K was the age of the single mum; my big sister was one, my mum was one, but the only thing that seemed to matter to thirteen-year-old me was not being caught carrying a Lidl shopping bag. Apparently I had enough emotional bandwidth to worry about a baby all night and protect my image. Listening to the right music and wearing the right clothes meant being seen, and being seen meant belonging.
But it also meant shoes.
Nike Cortez, Dunks and TNs were what my sister wore. I bought a second-hand pair of TNs a few years later and genuinely felt I had ascended to a higher social order.
My sister also gave me access to a world I was fascinated by. Her raves took her to Maidstone and London and there were whole rave tape packs you could buy at the events, and I listened to them because that was what the older people around me listened to. Smoking was just a way to look older. She smoked weed so we tried that too. I had smoked cigarettes a few times but one of my friends was already properly addicted, which seems extraordinary now. Y2K was the year you could buy ten L&Bs.
By thirteen music was becoming everything. The Spice Girls were lame. MTV Base was in. R&B, Jungle, Drum and Bass DJs and MCs were the soundtrack. Music came to me through my sister, her friends, television, CDs and tapes, and it offered glimpses of places and lives I wasn’t old enough to access yet.
Saturday meant going up ‘the’ town, although if my sister hadn’t come home yet I was, more often than not, still looking after Aidan. My sister only had a landline. If she went out, they were simply… out. You couldn’t watch a little blue tick and become progressively more furious.
The compensation for my sister being out a lot was access to her wardrobe. At the time I thought I wanted to look grown-up because grown-up looked cool. Now I can see that being older represented something much more important to me. Older meant having some control over where I lived and what happened next.
And then there were boys.
Mark Wilkinson was my crush. He thrilled me and terrified me in equal measure. I wasn’t quite ready for sex, but virginity had started looming over proceedings. The millennium was coming, people were talking about computers failing and the end of the world, but in my thirteen-year-old brain there was an equally pressing question: if civilisation was about to collapse, who was I going to lose my virginity to?
Y2K was also the age of my first fight at school, so I was clearly developing beautifully.
Tonight I’ve put on a matching trousers-and-top outfit that feels sufficiently Y2K, clipped up my hair and made space buns. I’m essentially dressed as a version of the thirteen-year-old me, although thankfully with twenty-six additional years of eyebrow experience. My wardrobe hasn’t changed much and I still get down to Faithless, Tatu and Liam Lynch.
Perhaps that is why I enjoy remembering it. I’m not particularly interested in deciding which clothes or records technically belonged to the year 2000. I’m interested in remembering how the world looked when I was thirteen.
Maybe that is what I miss about thirteen, rather than Y2K itself: not that everything was possible, but that I hadn’t yet worked out what wasn’t. And threaded through all of that ordinary teenage nonsense were things I was far too young to be dealing with.
How old were you in 2000? What did your bedroom smell like? What did you think made somebody cool? Who did you fancy, and what completely ridiculous thing could ruin your entire week?
Transport yourself back to that era here.
majorloveme 