Cuando éramos grunge

Photographer: Fernando Mañas
Models: Andrea Celda, Elisa Celda, Mariana Palanca, Lucía López
Stylist: La Condesa
Showroom: El armario de la tele

They say that a style doesn't come back until the people who wore it back then are old enough not to wear it again, or in other words, when the people who wear it now didn't experience the real era when that style was booming. Confused? Let's take the 90s and grunge; it's back now that the young people who adopted it didn't live through that era and can, therefore, reinvent it freely.

Because the grunge we experienced is NOT the grunge of today, no, no, no. Back then, we dressed really badly, even unintentionally, we managed it. Our aesthetic icons were Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder, men whose style was followed by both boys and girls. And for women, that was frankly unflattering.

Recently, we celebrated a friend's bachelorette party by dressing up as different stages of her life, for which we rescued all the buried Pearl Jam t-shirts she had, and gosh, they were enormous. Like wearing a potato sack with three holes, exactly.

We wore Doctor Martens even on New Year's Eve, which might be funny to remember now... until you see the photos and what you feel when you see them is an eyesore. And the mood of the time was a mix of anger and apathy combined with a bit of melancholy, an ideal breeding ground for adolescence. And why that spirit? Well, I imagine it's because your mood can't be very good when you listen countless times to songs like:

Alive, Daughter, Black or Jeremy - by Pearl Jam (I was very into Pearl Jam, Nirvana... meh)
Runaway Train - Soul Asylum
Round Here - Counting Crows

To name a few

But I am personally very proud to have had a poorly dressed adolescence focused on listening to (devouring) music, because I always liked fashion, but luckily as a teenager, that only meant reading Hola Especial Colecciones twice a year and having 3 pairs of boots that you combined with everything as best as possible. That's why (and because I'm getting old, I think I'm smarter and suddenly I want to give insipid advice) it makes me sad to see so many incredibly young people memorizing brands, going to great lengths to get a logo bag, or being morbidly conscious of their own image... there will be time for that, baby, now... be a bum, please, relax, you'll have time to put on heels and primp as much as you want, but first you have to learn to make a fool of yourself.

In my group of friends from Badajoz, there are a few of us who have a habit, when we meet, of telling each other recent stories in which we've made the biggest fools of ourselves. It's therapeutic, we've been doing it for years, and I sincerely believe it makes us stronger in the face of adversity. We meet and laugh about them.

Because in the end, years pass and all that's left are horrible photos (all of them) that you'd better learn to laugh at, like everything else, with your friends. From when you danced, shaking your hair like badasses at Inerzia, put on makeup in the home elevator and took it off when you got back, invented secret phrases to talk without outsiders understanding you (an inseparable clan), wore crop tops that showed your belly button, safety pins on your pants, or made tie-dye with bleach the hippest thing for your wig... so much to be ashamed of, so much to laugh about.

PS1: A trillion thanks to the showroom "El Armario de la tele" for lending us these beautiful clothes for the editorial.
PS2: This editorial has been another step in this blog's philosophy of "why make it simple when you can complicate your life much more," which started exactly a year ago with an editorial made with great humility but much more love with my favorite girls from Badajoz.
PS3: Thanks to Fernando, with whom I've recently allied to take us to the next level in content quality (the improvement in quality comes from his photos, of course). Even more thanks to the models Elisa, Andrea, Lucía and Mariana for being so BEAUTIFUL and especially kind to join our crazy ideas and show us that we cannot fall into the cliché that today's youth is worse than before.