Paper Paraphernalia 1

Seventeen's Ultimate Guide to Style

Today, a brief journey into paper goods, with Seventeen’s Ultimate Guide to Style.

This book is a “how-to” for teen fashion from 2011. I honestly don’t know if other people read it—I’ve never talked to someone who has—but either way, it’s an amazing time capsule. It’s one thing to look back at photos of celebrities, or at the other end of the spectrum, at photos of yourself. This book fills a specific void, somewhere in the middle: realistically aspirational teen outfits.

As a middle schooler, I pored over it constantly & was dedicated to modeling my outfits after the ones seen here. Now, a decade+ later, the words interest me just as much as the clothes. Obviously, the clothes are CRUCIAL as an encapsulation of what teen chicness and style were, but the language says a lot about how we thought about teenagedom.

It’s a delicate task, writing about clothing for an audience of teen (and realistically, tween) girls. 2011 was before mainstream culture/lingo was as social-justice minded as it is now, but after the blatantly eating disorder-fetishizing era that was the 2000s. It was also a time when social media was less widely used/accessible to tweens & young teens. There was a clearer boundary surrounding content for older and younger people. Reading these pages, you’ll find the book’s tone matches its contemporary iCarly more closely than it matches Tiktok.

Much like the Home Shopping Network (which I've written about), the book takes a vague approach to bodies and sex appeal, using words like “flirty” and “flattering,” all up to interpretation. Speak too frankly, you risk being crass; speak too abstractly, and you can’t point out the specific features and benefits of an item of clothing. The editors needed to come across like cool older sisters and legitimate fashion industry professionals while keeping all content very school-friendly.

Today, fashion feels both more and less rigidly categorized. If you want to devote yourself to a microtrend, you can, but microtrends’ inherent specificity renders them a) fleeting, aka hard to find after a while and b) pretty homogenous-looking. But back then, each style covered several seasons. You could find a blueprint complete with a list of stores they could reliably source from.

So please peruse these photos. Maybe you’ll get style inspo?

Love you love you, BYE!