It’s 2001. I just got home from soccer practice. I have on a powder blue jersey and checkered shorts—the kind with the alternating shiny and opaque squares. I peel off my grass-stained socks and un-velcro my shinguards which I leave in a small pile on the floor. There are small indentations on my calves from where the shinguards were strapped on. I yank my hair tie out and feel a dull ache where my ponytail was pulled tight in the back of my head. In the kitchen, I pull out a sleeve of saltines from the cupboard, place them in a circle on a plate and smear butter on each one. I bring the plate into the living room and a cushion from the couch to the floor so I’m closer to the TV, flipping through the channels to Lizzie McGuire. The short weave of the carpet scrapes my back.
Maybe I was feeling particularly unhinged this week but one late afternoon I signed into my sister’s Disney+ account and pressed watch when I saw Lizzie McGuire in the Recommended For You section. Of all the pre-teen female lead shows that aired in the early 2000s, Lizzie McGuire was the one I waited each week for. Lizzie was a clumsy, awkward teen with unremarkable desires—to be popular, to date Ethan Craft, the dopey boy who conditions his hair twice and speaks in inchoate sentences. There were things I’d forgotten about the show, like its use of soliloquy in the form of a cartoon version of Lizzie who gives the audience a look into her inner monologue, which, at the time, meant more insight into navigating girlhood. I like to think that this layer of interiority (something I look for now in anything I ingest) was one of the reasons I liked the show so much.
The fashion is 90’s eye candy. Lizzie McGuire and her best friend Miranda Sanchez dress and accessorize boldly, mixing patterns, color-blocking and assembling head to toe monochrome outfits. They’re always doing temporary things to their hair: braiding jewels into their ponytails, crimping sections of it or dyeing hot pink streaks to match their pink camo.
(Photos from Instagram account Everyoutfitonlizziemcguire)
I was ten when I started watching Lizzie McGuire. When I think back to what I wore then: pastel capris with glitter somehow inlaid in the fabric, shirts that said things like Superstar 99 and Soccer Princess, cargo pants, a black beret and strappy, lilac Puma sneakers, it felt like a way of asking myself is this what kind of girl I am? Is this? Is this?
Was Lizzie McGuire one of my first examples of maximalist fashion? Maximalism not just how it is defined as minimalism’s opposite, an aesthetic of excess or a more is more approach (which I’ve never resonated with) but more so a way of being open to unexpected combinations, a willingness to experiment and expand beyond a singular sense of self.
I’ve always had this thing about imagining people picking out their clothes. Something about the intention of it feels so vulnerable to me, picturing someone tilting their head in the mirror and deciding it looks good on them. It has to do with how much thought can go into choosing something for ourselves, in curating ourselves.
It feels rare when I can lift myself out of my own taste— when I listen to some subgenre of jazz and like it or find some patent leather boots that no algorithm would point me toward. I want an algorithm that tells me all the things they think I would hate! To mine some sense of self and style not to narrow it down but to stretch it out to its edges. I feel this sometimes when I’m getting dressed, closer somehow to my 10-year-old self when I have an intuitive way of choosing what I want to wear based solely on color or fabric or mood: gauzy pants, chunky black loafers, something strappy, taffeta, twill. . .
Things I Read & Recommend
Lust Must Have Struck For The First Time a poem by Jessica Lee in The New Yorker.
I started listening to Joanna Newsom again~...
Against Universality and in Praise of Anger by Chen Chen in Poets & Writers
“When the term universal comes up, ask: Whose universe?. . . I don’t want to transcend. I want to sing about living in a tangle of histories and dreams. Embrace that song, I’m reminding myself. Keep writing in and to a vastness of queer Asian trouble—a cosmos full of protest and tiaras, laughter and pissed-off poems, roses and ruptures and hot stubborn shit-starters who live.”
I’m So Tired by Sabrina Orah Mark in The Paris Review. I go through her writing with a fine-tooth comb.
The shiny boys’ soccer shorts I was talking about that I have in black.
~ You can always write to me by responding to this email, you can always tell me what you were wearing in 2001 or your equivalent 10-year-old self, you can always share with a friend, you can always keep it to yourself ~
Love—Natalie