The 90s Had The It Factor

And no, its not just because I'm obsessed with Love Story and Leo Di Caprio 2.0, like everyone else on planet Earth

For Girls Of The Nineties like me, we’ve always known that the 90s had it. It with a capital I. The It Factor. That indefinable something that I guess everyone believes is the purview of their teenage and early 20s years – the growing up and having fun years. The nostalgia and unbridled joy and rebellion of it all. Every generation has their decade, and mine was the 90s – and, good grief, they were cool. Music was cool, fashion was cool, magazines were cool, sitcoms were cool, even smoking was still cool. Sorry mom.

Also, I turned 15 in 1990 so I was primed – PRIMED – to enjoy the 90s to its absolute max. It was the decade of first love, first money, first freedoms; of ending school and starting uni and ending uni and starting a career. It was the last pre-Internet, pre-social media, pre-streaming decade, which mostly meant this if you were 15:

You had to listen to the radio if you wanted to hear a song you liked. You also needed to have your cassette tape in the right spot, ready to hit record when that song played and then you had to fervently pray that the radio DJ didn’t cut if off towards the end by yakking. The weeks I waited to record Pet Shop Boys It’s a Sin? Well, its family time that my parents will never get back.

You could sing incorrect lyrics for months, months… Until you brother pointed out that you were a moron. You could stand in Look & Listen with their headphones on previewing CDs you wanted to buy for hours. Flipping through racks of CDs was an art form - the clackity clack of the discs as they skittered through your fingers while you hunted down the artist and album that you were seeking out.

And when you found them and bought it, you could then spend further hours writing down the lyrics, so you had them on hand. Why? I don’t know. I have always been an excellent, A+ master procrastinator. I transcribed the entire album of The Mission’s Grains of Sand during matric finals. I don’t honestly know how parents didn’t strangle me when they heard Butterly on a Wheel come on for the thousandth time when they knew I was supposed to be studying for history.

You know who else was cool in the Nineties? Leo Di Caprio and it is this – not Love Story, although we’ll get to that in minute – that has cemented my firm belief that the 90s are back, baby! Now hang on there, Leo fans! Many of you will tell me that you never fell out of love with Leo. That you have been dyed- in-the-wool super fans since he failed to hop on that wooden door with Kate Winslet at the end of Titanic, and certainly when he’d gazed longingly through the fish tank at Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet. But many of less loyal gals, maybe decided – erroneously it must now be said! – that his staggeringly fine, baby-faced, cherubic good looks weren’t being done justice while he slept inside the carcass of a giant dead animal in Inarutto’s The Revenant or as got pounded by Daniel Day Lewis in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.

You were more likely of late to find a think piece about the rise of dad bods featuring Leo on a yacht than swooning over him, despite Leo being the source of some of the Internet’s most legendary memes. But that all leads to this year when Leo was spotted actually havin’ a laugh at the Golden Globes. We’ve barely seen the man out of a covid mask and a trucker cap in years, so the funny moment quickly went viral and he became, yes, a meme, but as himself, not in character. And this joviality stuck.

And then, and then… He rocked up at the Oscars sporting the most luscious of moustaches and every single woman who had ever watched Leo in the 90s did one giant hormonal faint. And every woman who had never thought twice about Leo joined them on the floor.

One moustache is all it took to reclaim his throne. That and our obsession, excuse the pun, relevance is coming – with the 90s. Leo Di Caprio always has been the ultimate 90s pin-up.

Okay… Love Story. Ryan Murphy’s Love Story has a lot to answer for. JFK Jnr and Caroyn Bessette were the It Couple. They were famous not because of movies or music but something altogether older, snobbier and more glamorous, it felt at the time. And as a result of not being in movies or music, it was that much more difficult - especially in a pre-Internet age - to know much about them. And more especially, her.

The odd paparazzi images were pored over, examined to death, her outfits copied not just by schlubs like me in my first office job, but by Jennifer Aniston in Friends in her Ralph Lauren office job. We took that knee high boot, pencil skirt and white shirt combo and we Carolyn Bessetted the hell out of it. My god, their mystery was cool. We knew so flipping little. I don’t know how Ryan Murphy managed to cobble together an entire series on the scraps that we had available for public consumption at the time. There is quite obviously a lot of fictionalised retelling in between the bits we know to be true.

And then there’s New York of the 90s – its own character – and Calvin Klein in the 90s – both the man himself and the brand – iconic. CK One – incidentally Sarah Pidgeon’s (she plays Bessette on Disney’s Love STory) bag at the Oscars was a bejewelled CK One bottle – was the first androgynous fragrance, a citrusy blend that suited the boys as well as it suited the gals, and everyone else in between. It was so chic and so sexy and so understated – in packaging, campaign, ennui and scent. Its screw-top lid and unadorned hipflasky bottle was understated and thus, so so cool.

Yes, for me cool will always be understated. It’s why the Kardashians will never be cool. It’s also why nothing will ever be as cool as a time before the Internet, because you had to genuinely Be Cool. There was no algorithm to dictate your choices; force your hand or skew your perception. It’s why Leo was cool. We were fed scraps and we turned it into a feast!

And now we have him back and we’re wearing slip dresses, leaving our hair messy; wearing our boyfriend’s fragrance; listening to Crowded House and Seal… And Talk Talk. And I am hear for it. Bring me my mixed tapes and a watermelon Esprit!