RIP to DIY

Pinterest, Rookie Magazine, and the online DIY movement were my recession-era comforts. Are the kids still into that kind of thing?

First, some housekeeping! I am reading a version of this piece tomorrow at the Scrappy Reading Series in my beautiful perfect neighborhood in Brooklyn, and you should come! Yes, you! There are going to be some really incredible writers there and I’m very flattered to be included. RSVP here if you’d like to pop by and say hi xo

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Photo belongs to Marlena Mayle from her 2012 guide to DIY Decoupage badges for Rookie.

I am arts-and-crafts averse. My handwriting has been described as “bizarre,” and I couldn’t hold a pair of scissors properly until I was thirteen. I only recently began wrapping birthday and Christmas presents myself. Before, I would bring packages to the Paper Source on Smith Street and pay an amount of money I will not disclose to have them professionally wrapped. Every piece of pottery I’ve ever sculpted has exploded catastrophically in the kiln, and every painting I’ve ever attempted has wound up looking childish in a way that is neither avant-garde nor endearing. I chose all of my Arts Gen Ed courses carefully, opting for Art History and a delightfully woo-woo dance class called “Embodiment in/through/of Writing,” which primarily required improvising a sort of worm-like writhing around the floor and journaling about how it made me feel afterward. Suffice it to say, I mostly felt like a worm. On days I was hungover, I felt like a worm with a hangover. Neither class particularly appealed to me, but unlike more material expressions of art, they were hard to fuck up, and I am, unfortunately, the kind of person who would rather avoid doing something entirely if there’s even a chance I may fuck it up (I’m working on it). However, invention and creation as means of expression, as we all know, are not limited to arts and crafts.

In the 2010s, my family, like many others post-2008, experienced the beginning of a financial tailspin that changed our lives considerably and placed a tremendous strain on our four-person unit. There’s never a great time for this to happen, but it was a particularly unfortunate time for me—middle and high school, when self-assessment regarding what others have and what you lack is constant and painful. I began working in a restaurant as soon as I legally could to regain a semblance of control, but before that, I found a sense of agency in an unexpected place.

You see, 2008 may have brought economic destruction to millions of American families, but 2009 brought Pinterest. If you’ve never used the platform before, it’s essentially a digital pinboard where users curate images and links they find pretty, interesting, or useful. Fashion, design, and beauty have long dominated content on Pinterest, but in the 2010s, the platform also helped usher in a new manifestation of the do-it-yourself, or DIY, movement. The site was overflowing with ideas and tutorials to very simply and affordably make just about anything an adolescent girl might want—body scrubs made from sugar and lemon, perfume using vanilla extract from the pantry, magazine clippings or photos printed off of Tumblr to serve as artwork for my room. The DIY resource library on Pinterest brought me foolproof methods for creating versions of the deliciously-scented lotions and potions British YouTubers were slathering on their arms without having to ask my parents for a trip to Ulta or CVS, which would inevitably lead to an argument. I was surprised to find myself empowered when I ignored the call of the incredibly enticing but prohibitively expensive Pottery Barn Teen catalog and prevailed upon Pinterest and YouTube to teach me how to sand down my dark wooden nightstands and paint them robin’s egg blue. They were beautiful, and I had made them that way.

Best of all, the growing popularity of DIY was not something that was strictly limited to me and all the other tweens with broke parents—it was as much about the process of creation as it was the final product, and girls from wealthier families were equally drawn in. It actually became sort of trendy, which was convenient for me. This coincided with fashion wunderkind Tavi Gevinson, who with the help of Sassy magazine alums launched Rookie, a digital mecca for teenage girls who were drawn to bright colors, got teased by boys in school, and generally felt weird a lot of the time. We can think of Rookie and Pinterest maybe not as catalysts for each other, but as two glittery fish swimming side by side in the same direction down a stream. Both represented movement away from the rhinestoned fast fashion of my childhood and toward something grounded in invention and discovery more so than plain consumption. Rookie took things a step further, reviving the feminist tone and content that had been so present in Sassy, as a refreshing antidote to the likes of Tiger Beat, J-14, or Seventeen, which at the time had pages full of subtly embedded sponsored content suggesting what to buy, even toiletries, because “Justin Bieber loves the way they smell.” That is an actual quote from an actual magazine, and I know that because it was purple Herbal Essences shampoo and vanilla Softlips lip balm, the latter of which is an ineffective product that tastes like glue. Fourteen years later, I am still angry that I bought it. Justin never called.

On the other hand, the Rookie fashion playbook was to make oneself into a sartorial truffle hog—dig through thrift bins and your weird aunt’s closet to find something no one else you know could possibly own. Or, make something. This development and the rise in thrifting’s popularity were also convenient—rather than wistfully longing for a sixty-dollar Urban Outfitters sweater all the cool girls on the lacrosse team had, I had enough force behind me to feign disinterest in it in the first place because it was “so basic.” One of the final articles in Rookie’s fashion section before the publication shuttered in 2018 was “How to Make a Fishnet Top: A tough-looking wardrobe staple that costs next to nothing.” It was that kind of content that made being a teenage girl dealing with circumstances out of her control survivable.

Above from “Thrifting: The Master Class” by

Krista

Burton for Rookie in 2012.

In the last year or so, the idea of “recession indicators” has become a meme. They’re mostly specific pieces of nostalgia that feel almost uncannily from 2008—frozen yogurt shops, Kristen Stewart playing a straight person in a movie, Michelle Obama cofounding a “healthy soft drink” called Plezi (???). The popularity of DIY was absolutely a recession indicator. It makes sense! Spending power ebbs and flows, but the desire to spend and possess does not. DIY is in this way a net good—it is an act of determination, bucking at the often predatory “more, more, more” economy. If I cannot buy it, I will make it. When my credit card gets declined, I can pick up a glue stick.

I really want to avoid griping about the kids these days and their Stanley cups, but I do worry about them. They’ve been dealt a bad hand, with a pandemic having opened a sinkhole in the middle of their childhoods and left the world a more insular, selfish, and commerce-driven place than it was before. According to Gallup, most of them spend, on average, five hours per day on social media, where they are constantly coaxed into buying cheap goods. Let me be clear: that does not mean contemporary teenage girls are disengaged, or uninteresting, or uncreative. Teenage girls have always been and always will be not only the dominant tastemakers within pop culture but the most passionate, sensitive, scrappy people on this planet, and I will defend that belief with my dying breath. Not to mention, we adults aren’t exactly leading by example. The trend of overconsumption extends well beyond teenage girls—Temu, an e-commerce site that’s been referred to as “Amazon on steroids,” where you can buy a pair of sneakers for fourteen dollars (produced perfectly ethically, I’m sure), is visited by 152 million Americans each month. Their tagline? “Shop like a billionaire.” Rookie is long dead, and Pinterest has sold out. There were always ads, but the website is virtually unusable now, having followed TikTok’s cue and transformed into an algorithmic mall.

I feel very far away now from my time as that teenage girl and her experience. My relationship to money and the convenience it can provide is different than it was then. I too am seduced by videos of women placing cans of LaCroix into plastic bins in their refrigerators, deluding me into the belief that the one thing standing between me and executive dysfunction is a plastic bin from Amazon to put in my refrigerator. I haven’t completed a craft of any kind in a long time, and I struggle to practice creativity for creativity’s sake. That’s something I’m wrestling with.

I don’t believe the average American family raising the average teenage girl today is in any better financial position than a lot of families in 2010. The minimum wage in my home state of North Carolina (and federally) is seven dollars and twenty-five cents, the same as it was when I was a teenager. I wonder where those girls find recourse as I did, and I hope somewhere there is something I’m not cool or young enough to know about that teaches the principles instilled in me then: it is always much cooler to make something or find something in a weird place than it is to buy something everyone else will have, and that things do not always have to stay as they are—if you don’t like it, sand it down and paint it blue.

This is a mod-podge collage I made in 2021 when my then-boyfriend now-husband and I both had COVID and couldn’t leave the house and we started to feel insane so we made collages, and I don’t care if you don’t like it because I do!!!