In high school, I wanted so badly to be a prep. But it was a look, at that time, both difficult and expensive to achieve. The cost of a mere shirt from the likes of Abercrombie or Structure was too absurd for my parents to entertain. Instead, they recommended that I get my own job to pay for it. “Julie, if you want something so badly, you’ll find a way to get it,” they would chant. So naturally, I decided to go without (though if I did really want “it” that badly, maybe I should have just shoplifted). I might have been young, but I wasn’t naive. I knew working was a horror show that all humans should avoid until they absolutely had to do it. 

For the lucky ones, that meant after college, when their parents’ threshold for financial pain finally expired, never to revive again (save for the truly privileged, who might be able to coax more dough out of them later on in life, by way of a wedding or the request for help with a down payment on a house). I certainly wasn’t going to squander that. A.k.a. what little blip of a cush life I could enjoy. For what is it to be a child if not to have indentured servants in the form of your parents? 

Still, it didn’t much assist with my aspirations of “being a prep.” Or at least looking like one. I guess you could say that high school was the period during which I truly learned the meaning of the adage, “The clothes make the (wo)man.” If that were true, then I wasn’t much better off than pre-glowup Cinderella. Alas, I had no fairy godmother to transform me from Hot Topic goth to Lacoste prep. Hell, even American Eagle prep. I suppose there is something to the idea that all goths want(ed) to be preps. Because it meant acceptance, power…having a chance to bone the tan, muscular boys (instead of the pale, flabby ones who tended to listen to really annoying music). I wanted that, shameful though it was for me to admit back then. And I knew I would never be able to have it (prep/jock dick, that is). Would have to suffer through the already bleak years of high school as the resident “Daria” figure. Or maybe Andrea, the actual goth character who skulked along the periphery of that show, was the more accurate comparison. 

The irony was, I only appeared moody on the outside, but was actually quite agreeable and easygoing on the inside (at first). I didn’t fall under the description of what Morrissey said when he bleated, “I wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside.” I wore black because it was fucking cheap. And timeless. Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face wasn’t a perennial style icon for nothing. But the more people pigeonholed me as a “goth,” the more I felt obliged to “accommodate” the stereotype. I found myself putting on thick black eyeliner, black lipstick and even powdering my face in white, Marie Antoinette-style.

After a while, it just became sort of like my automatic drag. A defense mechanism to mask the reality that I didn’t have the funds to be the prep I wanted to be. And if I couldn’t afford the aesthetic of a prep, I might as well go in the total opposite direction, right? Anyway, that’s the logic I was working with in that era (before Gen Z started labeling single days as “eras”). A logic that ended up really ostracizing me more than I needed to be. And all ultimately because, well, I was a broke ass compared to the other kids I went to school with. Or, should I say, my parents were. Because we all know that, as a “child” (read: any age under eighteen), you are your parents’ socioeconomic status. Without their “success,” yours is probably all but hopeless. 

After I graduated and segued into college, my all-black look was actually met with far more warmth among the student body, Catholic or not, at University of Portland. Maybe once you’re out of high school, you simply become a better person. A “nicer” human being. Which is to say, not so goddamn rough around the edges and concerned with what everyone else has or doesn’t have because now you have to pay for it all yourself. Being obsessed with appearance hits different when you have to fund that appearance without parental backing. I truly believe that’s why teenagers become less cunty when they reach the college age. The magic of “understanding” how expensive it is to live, let alone “look posh” while doing it. 

But I guess, what I was trying to say amidst all of this, is that, in the present, with fashion trends being cyclical as they are, the prep look has made a major resurgence. Only now, it’s much more affordable because, well, there’s environmentally-decimating companies like Sh**n to help anyone “snag” the aesthetic. I didn’t think it was fair. Suddenly you could just be whoever you wanted to be because of immoral Chinese entities charging five dollars for a wannabe tennis skirt and sweater with a sewn-on shirt collar underneath? What the fuck was that? It was completely unjust to millennial goths who secretly wanted to be preps the entire time they were in junior high and high school. In short, it was completely unjust to me. Nonetheless, I did what any millennial trying to recapture their youth would do: I bought a bunch of prep shit from Sh**n knowing full well it would never compare to the expensiveness of the material formerly sold at “glory days of prep” establishments.

Really, millennials can’t let Gen Z take everything from them, as though the preppy-chic identity they’ve adopted from TikTok is something they came up with themselves. Even though the words “Abercrombie & Fitch” truly mean nothing to them now. And if it does, the meaning that comes to mind is “white supremacy.” In which case, why try to dress like a prep at all if it’s so rooted in “Aryan values,” huh? Well, because that’s how badly they want to recreate the 2000s, I suppose. But not, mind you, even half as badly as millennials themselves.