I.
Let’s start with a guided meditation: It’s 2004 and you’re going to the mall.
It’s the end of the school day. Feel the locker combination spinning in your hand. Hear the jingling ringtone emanate from the pink Motorola Razr in your pocket, and the sound of your mom’s voice when you pick up. Her minivan is right out front, waiting to pick you and your BFF up. You’ve been waiting for this day, saving up your allowance for a new top to wear to the school dance on Friday.
Feel the butterflies in your stomach and a sensation you can’t quite place yet—one day you’ll know it by its proper name, anxiety—as you think about how great you want to look at the dance. Feel the hard plastic brush against your scalp as you run it through your heat-damaged, stick-straight hair. See the “It’s Totally Raining Teens” Vanity Fair cover from last year taped inside your locker, the crinkled copies of YM and Teen People and Seventeen shoved together on the top shelf.
Feel the weight of Maybelline’s Dream Matte Mousse foundation as you spackle more slightly-orange gunk on your face. Picture your reflection in the tiny mirror. Smell the hint of bubblegum as you swipe on a fresh coat of Juicy Tubes lip gloss. Tuck a crisp $20 bill into the pocket of your pleated denim miniskirt. Feel the pit of your stomach growling, the saliva pooling in your mouth as you think about the promise of that Auntie Anne’s pretzel you shouldn’t have. (You’re on a diet, even though you’re only in the ninth grade.)
Notice the Hollister at the far end of the mall. Hear the sounds of Usher’s “Yeah!” pumping from the stereo system. Smell the thick cologne wafting through the air, allowing its indeterminable top notes to fill your nostrils. Visualize the hot pink polo you wanted in the corner of the store. Picture the employees at the checkout counter—the boys who look like professional athletes, the girls who look like models—and try your best not to feel bad about yourself.
You have secured the in-look. You will dance with your crush on Friday. The popular girls will compliment you in the bathroom.
Life is good.
II.
Within such a world, Mean Girls (2004) sprang forth: a pitch-perfect teen comedy appearing at the tail end of the genre’s popularity, a film that’s both a product of its time and a mirror held up to reflect its absurdity.
Everything about Mean Girls immediately screams early-aughts. Think of its cast, led by Lindsay Lohan—the It Girl of Young Hollywood at the time—and supported by Lacey Chabert (Party of Five) and two soon-to-be It Girls, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried. Consider its creative team: a screenplay from then-SNL scribe Tina Fey, produced by Lorne Michaels’ production company (known primarily for not-great attempts at stretching the SNL universe from television to film), and directed by Mark Waters, fresh off the success of a Lohan-led Freaky Friday remake. And of course, there’s the material itself—the plot points and jagged jokes and brutal characterizations that might not have aged particularly well, but were right at home within the era’s culture.
But most of all, there’s the film’s fashion. Curated by costume designer Mary Jane Fort, Mean Girls is a time capsule filled with clothing that defined not just the year 2004, but how it felt to be an American teenager in 2004—the Juicy Couture tracksuits, the impossibly low Seven for All Mankind jeans and heart-shaped Return to Tiffany & Co. charm necklaces, the teeny tiny rainbow monogrammed Louis Vuitton bags and equally miniscule miniskirts, the bare midriffs and visible bra straps demanding rail-thin bodies to adorn. (If Mean Girls’ North Shore High School had a dress code, it was definitely not enforced.)
It was a time when our social networks were still mostly local, and when there were fewer trends to begin with, some of which lasted long enough to reach the masses and create a more or less uniformly agreed upon in- and out- list. It was a time when designer logo flaunting was neither garish nor camp but stylish and trendy, and, above all else—in a world where social status was more mutable than ever before—deeply aspirational. “Eat the rich” was not as common a refrain back then; we still thought we could be the rich if we really worked hard enough, and there was no quiet to our pursuit of luxury. It was an era of new money and oversized McMansions, an eye in the recession storm, wedged between the post-dot com bust and pre-housing market crash, a time of rabid consumerism.
It was, in short, an era of extreme vapidity.
III.
What happens when the child of anthropologists finds herself in a new environment, dropped into an American high school after growing up off the grid on safari in Africa? Up until this point in her life, Cady Heron (Lohan) has had no reason to believe that clothes weren’t merely meant to serve a simple, utilitarian function—this keeps you dry, this keeps you warm, this keeps the bugs off—and that you’re lucky if you happen to like how they look, too. At an American high school, though, she realizes quickly that she doesn’t know how to operate in this new world. So she does what any scholar would do: aided by two local guides, fellow outsiders Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), she studies the inhabitants’ behavior, observes their social structures and hierarchies, their mating calls and costumes, their rules and mores.
When she falls in with the Plastics—Regina (McAdams), Gretchen (Chabert), and Karen (Seyfried)—Cady realizes there’s still so much she doesn’t know. She comes up with a way to classify life: there is the actual world, which she’s familiar with. There is Animal World, which she knows intimately. And then there is Girl World, about which she is clueless. The things she knew about one realm, she thinks, can’t inherently translate to the other. That is, of course, until she realizes that Girl World is Animal World. We primp and we peacock and we prowl, and—whether predator or prey—dress ourselves up out of necessity and vanity alike. We’re all animals.
IV.
The Plastics’ Rules of Fashion are as follows:
- You can’t wear a tank top two days in a row.
- You can only wear your hair in a ponytail once a week.
- You can only wear jeans or track pants on Fridays.
- On Wednesdays, we wear pink.
Break any of these rules and you’ll find yourself cast away from the group at lunch time, left to find another table at which to eat. Where you sit in the cafeteria is no trivial matter; it’s the only time of day when everyone in the school comes together. Where you sit also says everything there is to say about your social status, at a time where social status matters more to you than anything else. There could be no fate worse than to be seen searching desperately for another group to take you in.
V.
I’m not saying anything new when I say this, but: clothing has always existed in part as a shortcut to self-definition, as a way to signal to others who you are. This is almost never more evident than when you’re coming of age. There is no subtlety when you’re a teenager trying to figure out not only yourself but the entire world and your place within it, even if that world doesn’t extend too far past the confines of the high school cafeteria.
What you wear to high school says who you are, and to whom you belong. You’re an artist or you’re an athlete, a brain or a burnout or a bimbo. Sometimes the clothing transcends group association and becomes the group itself. If I say “Cookie Monster Pajama Pants Girl,” many of you will know exactly the type of person I am talking about.
Trying on clothes is a way of trying on other lives. When you’re older, you likely have a better grasp of the characters within you to whom your closet caters, but when you’re young, the possibilities are endless. You try on an identity one day, come home from school that afternoon, and realize that’s not who you are at all, and you try on something new.
A brief tour of identities I tried on as a teenager: future lawyer or politician (pointed-toe stilettos and Banana Republic Outlet business casual skirt suits); country club trophy wife (cable knit Ralph Lauren sweaters in every imaginable color); fashion designer (reworked vintage thrift store dresses); and whatever baby pink faux Uggs—no matter the season—and tees with phrases like “Mrs. Affleck” bedazzled across the chest is. Future Mrs. Affleck, I guess? Obviously, I ended up becoming none of these things in real life, but it was fun to imagine a world in which I could. The act of playing dress up was a thrill, trying on different versions of myself until I landed on the ones whose skin felt best.
VI.
If clothing can say “This is who I am,” it can also say—as in the case of the Plastics— “This is who I am aligned with.” Fashion, in Girl World, is used not only as a form of expression or a means to cultivate identity, but as a way to uphold the status quo.
It would be easy to ask what’s so alluring about the Plastics, what sort of power they possess (besides the obvious: being thin, pretty, and wealthy) that would make a person want to chase their status, if it wasn’t all so enigmatic to begin with. No one really knows much about Regina George (McAdams), aside from a few trivia facts that might well be rumors—she does car commercials in Japan, she once met John Stamos on a plane (and he told her she was pretty), etc.—but many girls at the school aspire to be her, or at least within her orbit. Her two lackeys, Gretchen (Chabert) and Karen (Seyfried), are equally enamored and fearful.
You follow them, helping uphold their position in the hierarchy, simply because everybody else does. And even if you’re not in the group, you still want to forge some type of connection anyway. “I saw Cady Heron wearing Army pants and flip flops,” one girl confesses as Cady’s popularity grows, “so I bought Army pants and flip flops.”
You can kind of see why Janis would want to convince Cady to infiltrate the Plastics and destroy Regina’s life. Who wants to live like this?
VI.
“You read in every textbook that cliché: Power corrupts. In my opinion, I’ve learned that power does not always corrupt…When you’re climbing to get power, you have to use whatever methods are necessary, and you have to conceal your aims…But then when you get power, you can do what you want. So power reveals.”
– Robert Caro, The New York Times
“See, at least me and Regina George know we’re mean. You try to act like you’re so innocent. Like, ‘Oh, I used to live in Africa with all the little birdies and the little monkeys.’…So why are you still messing with Regina, Cady? I’ll tell you why. Because you are a mean girl! You’re a bitch!”
– Janis Ian, Mean Girls
VII.
I’m always fascinated by the final look we get at Cady before her downfall, the night of the small get-together she hosts while her parents are out of town that quickly spirals into an all-out party, which culminates in a fall out with both her real friends (Janis and Damian) and her fake friend (Regina).
She makes a grand entrance, the kind we’ve come to associate with Movies: the slow walk down the stairs, the gasp from observers at the big reveal. This party will be different than the ill-fated Halloween party. “And this time when Aaron saw me, I wouldn’t be caught in some ridiculous costume,” she says in voiceover. She means it sincerely, but the shot is a joke—not the kind that gives you belly laughs, but the kind that makes you smirk and feel a little sick to your stomach. She’s overdressed for the occasion, though she’s more in a state of undress: her little black dress at once too tight and too short, complimented by her pink bra straps and black tights, her teased hair and heavily lined lids. This time it’s not a costume, but she looks ridiculous nonetheless.
Earlier, when Cady showed up for her first Wednesday with the Plastics, she was dressed in baggy jeans and an even baggier borrowed Polo shirt, her hair tied back in a neat ponytail. As Mean Girls progresses, though, her clothes grow increasingly shorter and tighter, her hair fluffier, shoes higher, makeup glossier. She moves from disguising herself as a Plastic, to trying on the life of a Plastic, to, eventually, fully becoming one. The revenge plot takes on a life of its own, until Cady is no longer motivated by the revenge itself, but rather by the power she has acquired. Maybe it took the thrill of usurping Regina as the queen bee to seduce her into the role, but the part was always there inside her, just in shabbier clothes.
VIII.
It’s not easy being a girl. It’s not easy having to wait until the end of the week to wear a pair of pants, or having to make sure you don’t use your one ponytail day before a truly bad hair day when you need it. It’s not easy sacrificing the expensive white gold hoop earrings your parents got you for Hanukkah because your best friend has declared that hoop earrings are her thing. It’s not easy, but it is stupid, and also funny, because some of this is just being in a hell of your own making, following random rules made up by 17-year-old girls as a way to enforce a certain power dynamic. They can be broken at any time, though once you try, you quickly realize what they were really all about to begin with. “Those rules aren’t real,” Regina says when she’s booted from the Plastics’ lunch table for wearing sweatpants on a Monday. “They were real that day I wore a vest,” Karen replies, shocked at the thought they could have ever been selectively enforced. Regina corrects her: “Because that vest was disgusting.”
And sure, we can blame patriarchal standards, or deeply ingrained internalized misogyny, for why anyone would make these rules in the first place. But really, how many times have you heard the joke ‘I don’t dress for boys, I dress for the other girls in the bathroom’? The rules don’t exist to impress guys—guys don’t care. They mostly exist to create divisions of power amongst ourselves—to give us the high of fitting in, or the terror of standing out. Or, perhaps more simply, they exist to give you a feeling of control at a time in your life when you actually have very little.
IX.
The ending of Mean Girls is admittedly a bit of a cop-out. Cady realizes, at a Mathlete competition, that she can roast her opponent’s visible lack of style all she wants, but that won’t stop the girl from beating her in the competition. She offers us a shallow teen movie platitude voiceover: “Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George’s life definitely didn’t make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.”
She wins the coveted title of Spring Fling Queen dressed as herself, her true self, in her Mathletes uniform—khakis and a polo (one that fits this time), with a varsity letter jacket thrown on top—before she splits her crown up between everyone else. It’s both a peace offering and a reality check that none of this shit—the rules and the clothes, the drama and the status, the competition and the title—really matters. “It’s just plastic,” she says, gripping the dinky tiara in her hand.
Everyone gets a happy ending epilogue, all old wounds are healed, and a new era of Girl World emerges where every clique coexists in peace. It’s a nice little button, even if it’s completely unrealistic. Animal World, Girl World, and Real World are all the same. Eliminate one way to erect social structures and amass power, and a new one will be found. But we don’t need to debate if world peace is or is not possible here. This is Movie World we’re talking about, not Real World.
In Regina George’s words: “Whatever. I’m getting cheese fries.”
X.
Let’s end with another guided meditation: It’s 2025 and you’re getting dressed.
Immerse yourself in the warmth of your bed. The day is early and the year is still young. Feel the weight of the covers as you lay beneath them for 20 minutes, watching TikToks of influencers trying to sell you a dupe of a dupe of a designer dress or a style of jeans, telling you why some new aesthetic is the latest It-style. Embrace the wisdom and knowledge you’ve acquired with age. You do not need to buy things just because everyone else does. You do not need to be a Clean Girl or a Cool Girl; you do not need to be a Mafia Wife or an Office Siren. These trends and rules will be both ubiquitous and outdated by summer’s end.
Screen time is over. Rise from your bed, pull the curtains open, and welcome the light into your room. You are an adult now, with a closet full of clothing you have bought with your own money. Feel the hanger of a dress that would constitute as fast fashion had you not bought it 12 years ago, and as it passes through your hands, remember the version of yourself you were when you first purchased it. You’ve been slowly working on building out a wardrobe that is more sustainable, clothing that is in it for the long haul, but you keep that dress because you’re still that person sometimes. You are not disposable, and neither are (some of) your clothes.
Life is full of choices. It always changes, and so can you. You can be anything you want.
You put on a pair of jeans and a vintage tee shirt. You tie a scarf around your neck and hook earrings in your ears. You take a selfie of your reflection in the mirror that you will post later on your Instagram story. Your friends will send compliments to your DMs, but even if they don’t it will be okay. You like how you look.
Life is good.