Gen Z Design Trend Thoughts + My Childhood Room

Project 365, Day 233/365

Yesterday, in honor of lillordag, I decided to poke around the internet and do a little daytime blog reading around lunchtime. While I had seen the new post email from Style by Emily Henderson come through, I only glanced at the title and decided maybe I’d skip it today. It was about Gen Z design trends, and I tend to skip articles revolving around generational things mostly because they’re always some form of clickbait. Not that I thought this would be clickbait, just…not something I was super interested.

But then I had a mid-afternoon slump and I went back to it, and I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would. What the “young people” are calling “aesthetic” (and no, not in the same way we’d use the word, the style is actually called “aesthetic” like we might say “mid-century modern” or “boho glam”) truly just felt like “teenage room” to me. Fairy lights, walls covered in clippings from magazines and posters (or whatever are “magazines and posters” today because do young people buy magazines and posters?), vinyl records, faux vines and flowers. While not entirely similar, it just instantly brought me back to my high school bedroom.

I was always lucky that my mom gave me the leeway to design my bedroom however I wanted. I can recall three design iterations that were less style-focused and more theme-focused: English rose garden, moons and stars, slightly more grown-up moons and stars. I was ever much one for sticky-tacking fold-out posters of Jonathan Taylor Thomas or the New Kids on the Block from Tiger Beat magazine. My walls were sticky-tacked with glow-in-the-dark stars, and then some additional moons and stars I sponge painted in blue and yellow, almost creating my own wallpaper. The curtains and bedroom skirt were sewn by me under my mother’s watchful eye, emblazoned with the same sponge-painted motif as my walls.

While I wish I remembered every detail or even had photos of teenage Arlyn’s world, I don’t, but there are a few things I do remember that made up my surroundings, and I thought it’d be fun to share them, with whatever images I could source from the internet. Let’s see what I could find:

Blue LED Rope Light

I got these as a gift, but I can’t remember from who. At one point, I wrapped them around the iron frame of my white daybed. At another point, I tried to tape them to the edge of my ceiling (that was a failed attempt as the rope was far too heavy for the standard tape I had to use). I can still picture the bright blue glow in my dark room. I felt like the coolest kid around.

My Lava Lamp

I bought that lava lamp with my own money..and I was so proud. Not sure if anyone remembers the store Spencer’s Gifts, but I had eyed the lava lamps for what felt like eons. They were about $40…what might as well be a yearly salary to a teenager, but somehow, I got the amount together and spoiled myself. It was silver, with blue water and I’m struggling to remember what color the actual lava was. Possibly white. Maybe green. What I do clearly remember is how hot it got, so my parents were always on my back—rightfully so—about not leaving it on if I wasn’t around. I could sit for so long, watching it warm up until the first glug would move, eventually, all the lava bubbling around in large blobs.

Plastic Bead Curtain

The sound of those plastic beads rustling against each other will forever live in my mind. Like a delicate rain shower of glass shards. The bead curtain was blue…I think, just like everything else in my room, and sat about two or three feet away from the door to my room. That way, I could open the door fully without having to pull strands off of it before closing fully. It was usually tangled, either in itself or in my hair, but I loved it. It made me feel like I lived in a Delia’s catalog, and what teenage girl didn’t want that back in the early 2000s?

Canvas Butterfly Chair

There were only two chair options to be had back in 2001: an inflatable armchair or a butterfly chair. Having experienced the rubbery, sticky mess that was the inflatable chair at a friend’s house, I opted for the canvas butterfly chair. I think mine came from Urban Outfitters, which is actually shocking, because I rarely had anything from a “cool” brand. When you come from a family with four kids, you were used to making amends for the sake of “budget” and “money” and all of that (important) stuff that didn’t fully make sense to you at the time. I sat in this very chair, looking at my lava lamp, reading my YA novels or chit-chatting on the phone with my BFFs.

Glow in the Dark Stars

I had these on my walls but also hanging from fish wire tacked to my ceiling…though only in the front part of my room (an unfinished project). I’m pretty sure that 2×2 patch of stars stayed up there for well over a decade, an ode to my lack of dedication to just about any DIY initiative I’d embark on.

There were many other things in my room, like the giant stuffed cow I won at Six Flags on a field trip with my marching band and my bookshelf full of my Babysitter’s Club collection. It was a space I was really proud of, because I had done it myself, with my mom helping in the way I asked. It was nothing I pulled from an inspiration like Pinterest or Instagram because, of course, that didn’t exist. It just came from my mind, and what I knew I liked. And it stayed that way until I moved away to college and eventually came back, moved into my brother’s previous room because it was much larger and had a cable output, and redecorated in a theme I could only call “IKEA lite.”

Does anyone have a clear memory of a childhood or young adult bedroom? It would be so fun to hear about!

See you tomorrow, FOAS.