If hell is a teenage girl, heaven might be her bedroom. And as Taylor Swift teases a new project with a decidedly 2014 aesthetic; Kylie Jenner’s pastel pink locks ring true to her King Kylie era; the band Vampire Weekend gears up for a comeback album; and endless iterations of indie sleaze, soft grunge, and hipster fashion return in full force, it’s only right to reexamine arguably the most iconic era of adolescent quarters: the Tumblr girl bedroom.
If you came of age during the early 2010s, this phrase requires little explanation. But for a quick primer, think fairy lights strung about, a tapestry hung above a bed, and a combination of pictures and posters plastered to every surface. Crosley record players were the Ultrafragola mirrors of the day, and the only checkered print in sight was the artful arrangements of polaroids on walls. Cluttercore had nothing on the artfully disorganized rooms of the original chronically online teens.
Personally, I look back on this decor era fondly. It represented the first time I saw interior design as an avenue of expression and was among the most honest iterations of my room over the years. Perhaps because, like others, my walls were only adorned with things that mattered to me: pictures of friends, posters of bands I liked, references to TV shows I obsessed over, quotes that felt life changing at the time.
“I feel like everyone’s room was just like a big collage,” says Trang Dong, an actress and content creator based in Los Angeles. Camille Lenore Nichelini, another content creator living in LA, fully agrees. “I saw my wall at the time as a collage,” she recalls. “In the present day, you’d say that’s a gallery wall. But back then, I just called it my collage wall.” Both remember hanging up anything and everything that felt personal: Tickets from concerts, cutouts from magazines, and vinyl records were popular choices. “Just anything I thought looked cool,” Camille adds.
Trang’s middle school bedroom was decorated with posters of One Direction and Justin Bieber and slowly evolved to include knickknacks she’d collected or printouts from shows that she’d participated in throughout high school. Camille’s played particular homage to her music taste, with an aesthetic derived from the black-and-white album covers of her favorite releases at the time, such as the Arctic Monkeys’s AM, Lorde’s Pure Heroine, The 1975’s self-titled album, or Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence. “My decor back then heavily revolved around my music taste and the branding of those records,” she notes.
Nuance was perhaps the only thing not strung about in a Tumblr room. “It was very important that there were no inferences; everything was very heavy-handed,” says Heather Hurst, a New York–based content creator and cofounder of Vintage HQ. “It was all very explicitly in your face so that when somebody would walk in your room, they knew what you were interested in.” In some ways, it was the ultimate example of form follows function—if the function was shamelessly celebrating what made you you, the form was cozy chaos.