It seems every week there’s a new article declaring that indie sleaze is back. Well I’m sorry, but while some of ya’ll might be wearing unflattering low-rise jeans again, the spirit of that era is long gone.
I get the nostalgia. I get wanting to magically time travel back to a world before relentless documentation, before people stopped drinking and fucking, before dating apps and doom scrolling, before optimization bros, before Instagram-face. But a peek of a thong and some smudged eyeliner will not get us there. What was actually happening, underneath the aesthetics, was an attitude toward life—and your own image—that required a certain amount of not giving a fuck that we’ve tragically lost.
Allow me to tell you what I miss.
I was an indie sleaze It Girl, apparently—at least, according to New York mag’s exhaustive It girl retrospective. To be fair, I did lean into some of the more unsavory cliches, namely: doing bumps with Lindsay Lohan at Purple parties, posing for mildly unflattering topless photos for Terry Richardson (twice), making bad period art, writing for Vice, and sleeping with countless guys in vaguely shit bands that the right people vaguely cared about for five minutes. So yeah, count me in.
To back up a little: I grew up in a small town in New York, and after high school I moved to London—ostensibly to go to drama school, but I dropped out after one semester, because I found doing ketamine more compelling than reading literal Hamlet. I didn’t have any money or prospects, but I certainly didn’t want to go home, so I moved into a freegan commune in a squatted elevator factory—as one does.
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