The Digital Bedroom

by Phoebe Gibb

*“Lost in my Bedroom,” Sky Ferreira, 2013 Capitol Records*

It’s your 28^th birthday, and your first time in Los Angeles. You step inside a store on Fairfax Ave. Inside the cinderblock building is ostentatious decor: mirrored walls, plush carpet, and Space Age lighting. The modest racks of designer clothes are secondary to the real focal point, a mass collection of curated objects displayed on shelves and tables: a new-in-the-box Anna Sui doll and official Barbie of Tippi Hedren in The Birds, a Japanese photobook of The Virgin Suicides, film posters for The Blair Witch Project and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, VHS tapes of The Crow, Being John Malkovich and The Year Punk Broke, a My Chemical Romance promo single CD ROM.

All perfectly curated yet seemingly random, thoughtfully arranged esoterica lining the walls like the ephemera and kitsch of an old nostalgic diner, or the colourful clutter of mementos at a shrine. A constantly rotating memorial of the past that had simultaneously nothing and everything to do with what the store was selling. The missing piece in all this was you, a product of suburbia and the 90s tech boom, the common thread needed to identify and relate the disparate meanings.

*Heaven by Marc Jacobs Opens on Fairfax, Undercover LA*

Here there are no pearly gates, but it’s Heaven all the same. Launched in 2020, Heaven by Marc Jacobs signaled a new era of streetwear that catered to the Y2K stylings of Gen Z. With this line, Jacobs partnered with Instagram-famous fashion bootlegger Ava Nirui (a millennial) to conceptualize what Vogue calls “a grungy take on teenage nostalgia.” Grunge, Nirui argues, is essential to the brand—a connection to Jacobs’s historic 1992 grunge collection that got him fired from Perry Ellis. Heaven is the reboot for 2020s youth who are ever-plugged into a scrollable reference library, and a nod to those who remember the original source.

By targeting celebrities, influencers, and nepo babies of the internet generation, and otherwise smashing the reference button, Heaven has captured audiences with what Nirui herself describes as a “dreamlike interpretation,” a sort of chopped and screwed choose-your-own inspo cut off from any one progenitor. Not unlike the (pale, soft) grunge offshoots and orphaned subcultures that found their way onto the dashboards and into the hearts of Tumblr kids of yore, Heaven’s familiar-yet-off-kilter imagining is no longer the grunge that got Jacobs fired—at least, not in and of itself. The brand is more akin to a collage, with an emphasis on things and people as much as clothes; its physical store, an archive of interests.

*Heaven by Marc Jacobs is Coming to London, Fashion United*

Heaven has only further entrenched itself in subcultural associations—working with cult numetal band Deftones to create a line of merch and selling ephemera that could be pulled directly from the wishlist of a Tumblr teenager in the 2010s, from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack (on CD) to vintage copies of i-D.

–Fast Fashion’s Gone to Heaven, The Digital Fairy

In addition to the fashion and brand curation, Heaven’s physical locations in LA and London also feature “curated finds from our friends,” in the form of vintage toys, décor, and memorabilia. In LA there are zines and coffee table tomes from Climax Books, in London there are rare prints, VHS tapes and objects from Unified Goods. In an interview with Isabella Burley, founder of Climax Books, Nirui states:

“A lot of the props that are in the store, and the way that [the store] is decorated, is what I imagined Marc’s teenage bedroom to look like. I found this old photo album of his from parties in the 2000s. I asked permission to display those images under the glass at the front desk where the cash register is and it all came together and became this dream space that’s ever-evolving…”

–Just like Heaven: an exclusive look at the brand’s new collection, The Face

If Heaven is a teenage bedroom for nostalgia-pilled millennials and fashion-pilled doomers, what conflux of trends and praxis have led us to this perfect afterlife? This syllabus will explore the bedroom as a site of identity-making, materialism in an increasingly curated world, and authenticity in the Insta age.

If you know you know

*the display case in the entrance corridor at Sofia Coppola’s Heaven 27 store in Daikanyama/Harajuku, Tokyo, Japan. (for my sister!), 2007, TDLR0301, Flickr*

*Sofia Coppola Heaven 27, Milk Fed, APC article in Harper’s Bazaar c. 1999*

In grade 4, your best friend has a poster of Avril Lavigne in her bedroom. You help her garnish it with Christmas lights and tape up a ripped-out notebook page covered in stickers that has the words “shrine to Avril” written out in scented magic marker. It’s compulsive, a feeling made physical, a manifestation of something sacred. Beneath it, you pray.

There was once another Heaven. In the 1990s, Gen X it girl Sofia Coppola (a longtime friend and collaborator of Marc Jacobs, whose daughter was the “face” of Heaven), opened Heaven 27 to carry her Milk Fed clothing line, decorated with her own collection of photographs and collectibles.

The Heaven 27 boutique opened in Tokyo in 1997, followed by spaces in Los Angeles and Osaka in 1998 and 2000, respectively. “X-Girl was a big inspiration for us to start our own company,” she recalls…The boutiques present the rare streetwear space that is absolutely—even exclusively—girl-friendly, offering various cosmetic products as well as a few items of literature and stationary. “It’s just stuff that we like,” notes Coppola, downplaying what a fun environment Heaven 27 really is. With comfortable chairs, the sounds of catchy pop music and a variety of magazines spread out across the space, Heaven 27 has the feel of a hangout as much as a boutique.

–metro.pop, Spring 2002

Previous generations can act as tastemakers for subsequent generations. Boomer John Hughes is famous for Gen X iconography; rockabilly is a Gen X aesthetic that emerged from Boomer-imposed nostalgia. An example of elder millennials adopting Gen X’s penchant for personal style over uniformity can be found in the thrift shop—all the better if it’s vintage sportswear or hypebeast-adjacent—where you’re likely to find shelves above clothing racks dotted with Happy Meal toys from the 1980s, limited edition Wheaties boxes, vintage posters, and a Michael Jordan cardboard cutout and playable SNES by the cash. These cultural commodities are preserved and recontextualized, removed from their big box store shelves and placed on a decorative pedestal, turning the teenage bedroom into a site of commerce. As commerce and adolescence became increasingly digitized, bedroom-making became less about archiving one’s own life, and more an aspirational pursuit—seeking out the curated, the specific—to affirm one’s inner persona and express it online. As such, The Digital Bedroom is the millennial’s trickle-down gift to Gen Z.

See also:

Cute aggression

*Teen bedroom, Jordan Dykstra 2007-2008, Flickr*

Your teenage bedroom has a shag carpet and periwinkle walls decorated with cut-outs from a stack of old Spin magazines from the library where you work, your first job. You have posters—Morrissey in a bathtub, and “I Want to Believe,” and a promo for Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere that you got for free from the video store down the street. You have the Ghost World graphic novel on display—a physical reminder of how the movie you love made you feel—and a book called Punk 365 from HMV. You made a collage with photobooth pictures, ticket stubs, cassette tape inserts and the one issue of NME you brought back from a trip to Europe. And because it’s the 2010s, a TOMS flag and Union Jack banner with the words “Keep Calm and Carry On.” You have stuffed animals from the anime you liked when you were a kid and plastic neon jewelry from Claire’s and hand-me-down clothes from older cousins, and you’re grasping. Grasping for any semblance of identity, for the IRL markers of things you re-blog, from a life lived in your bedroom, online.

“My lime green walls were covered in pages from magazines, gobs of jewelry hanging on nails, and angsty song lyrics that I wrote out in Sharpie. What’s fun about cluttercore is it REQUIRES personality and specialized interest in order to work and it celebrates radical individuality.”

–Hannah Martin, “Is ‘Cluttercore’ the Chaotic Good We Need Right Now?” Architectural Digest

Teenagers are masters of the special interest. Youth subculture and streetstyle exploded in the 90s as a counter reaction to the suffocating 80s monoculture, with the rise of independent labels, zine culture, and DIY music scenes like hardcore and indie rock. As Popcast’s Jon Caramanica summarizes in Nymphet Alumni’s episode on the 90s: “You could just point at a big thing and be like, ‘I don’t like that. I’m against that.’” Being subversive meant there was something to subvert, and niches were defined by a clear adhesion to an aesthetic narrative that reflected one’s personal interests. (Coppola: “It’s just stuff that we like.”)

With its unlimited access and mictrotrend cycle, the internet has forged a mass specialization and has turned us all into “curators” whose self-expression is based on cataloguing and collecting, sometimes hoarding. No longer an opposition, but a sameness that goes by many names. What is the balance struck between the obscure and esoteric, and general appeal? If we all like the same things, how do you signal good taste and individuality? What does a desirable life look like?

See also:

Who sleeps in the digital bedroom?

You are six years older than your younger sister, the tail end of one generation and the beginning of another. The day after you leave home for college at 17, she moves into your bedroom. No sooner do you unpack your dorm do your parents rip out the old shag carpet and replace it with veneer-wood, and paint the walls eggshell-white. Once in grade 8, your friend with an eyebrow ring saw your bedroom and remarked, “You got a lot of stuff, girl.” Now it is wiped clean, tabula rasa for a burgeoning clean-girl. But the bedroom isn’t gone, it has just shifted realms.

*Is “Cluttercore” the Chaotic Good We Need Right Now? Architectural Digest*

There is no place for self-actualisation like the Internet. To put on and take off identities, personalities, interests, and styles with no cost at all and by simply lifting a pointer finger. This has generally been considered an advantage of the Internet. I’d argue it is not. It feeds an instinct that has been trained in us from marketing executives. You can create a “self” and a “space” for that self, with none of it being real at all. One can suddenly identify with items, places, and people that do not extend past images. It is an identity that does not exist. You do not own these things, or often even the images that represent them.

–Moodbored, Olivia Linnea Rogers, Haloscope

In Part One we looked at the influence of the bedroom on the outer world, and Part Two discussed personal identity and aesthetics, or the outer world on one’s inner life. We now face a reckoning between the bedroom and the digital world, and their influence on each other; a bedroom as a copy of a fictional or flattened image bedroom, detached from its original meaning. The imagined bedroom, filled with all your favorite things that best represent your personality. In a generation obsessed with liminal space and nostalgia, the bedroom of your dreams doesn’t have to exist IRL. Look no further than the pre-2010 Flickr nostalgia accounts of Instagram and spend some time browsing the comments from current pre-teens lamenting their birth in the wrong era.

Conversely, creating your dream bedroom can become an artistic practice through which one demonstrates hyper-individuality in the form of excess: consider the “I Spy Core” genre of Gen Z Tik Tok bedrooms-as-content. For older zillennial homeowners (or at least renters) is the physical media obsession a result of scarcity mindset and digital obsolescence? Or is it merely a replication, amalgamation, or bastardization something that came before? What good are your literal surroundings if nobody else sees them? If no one else desires them?

*Source: weheartit.com via fuckyeahawesomedorms.tumblr.com*

“The bedroom is an archetype. To me it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don’t really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense…The bedroom represents so much more than we even realize. It’s such a better reflection of what’s going on with our youth than anything else.”

–Weyes Blood, “Weyes Blood Shows Us How She Made The Striking Cover For Her Exquisite New Album”, Stereogum