reMEmBEr WHeN ThE dEliAs cAtALOg wAs FILleD wiTh ThiS? Oh, the nineties, how we miss you.
For those of you who don't remember (or, yes, were too young), Delia's was the nineties catalog, selling all the era-appropriate apparel (wide-leg pants! baby tees! pageboy caps!) and cosmetics (glitter nail polish! butterfly clips!) a girl could ever want or need. It now exists as an e-comm website, but nothing will ever fill the hole left by the actual print catalog.
That's why we're so glad that Kate Gabrielle of kategabrielle.com, nostalgia queen and the woman behind such throwback blogs as Time Machine to the 90s and Scathingly Brilliant (as well as the delightfully random Is That Mustache Really Necessary? and Sleeeeeves), did us all a huge favor back in March of 2015 when she scanned and uploaded the pages of two crucial Delia's issues: Spring Break 1998 and Holiday 1999, which now live in infamy on the microblog Delia's Catalogs.
Kate said she found the catalog, "in middle school, around 1998. I was immediately obsessed and talked my parents into letting me order tie-waist maxiskirts and denim platform clogs. I think I stopped ordering from the catalog once I left high school… My last purchase was a pair of gold, glittery cat-face flats to wear on New Year’s Eve a few years ago."
Unfortunately, she no longer has most of her older Delia's items, but she isn't opposed to spending a little to get a catalog itself. "I shouldn’t admit this, because it’s a little embarrassing, but a few years ago I got into a bidding war on eBay for a nineties Delia’s catalog. When I lost the auction, I was kind of bummed that I’d never get to flip through those pages, and that’s when I glanced over at the collection of catalogs I’d already amassed and realized I should start scanning," and that's how the blog was born, says Kate. "I get so excited when somebody shares something online that feels like a time capsule—like photos of shopping malls from the late eighties or those ads for black light posters and silver lipstick in teen fan magazines from the nineties—and to me, the Delia’s catalogs provide that same sense of time travel." And yes, the blog will continue: "I still plan on adding more catalogs to the blog (I have nine more in my personal collection left to scan) as soon as I can find the time."
As for what's driving the retro boom, Kate said, "We’re the first generation to reach our late twenties [and] early thirties with the benefit of advances in technology that have allowed us to feed our nostalgia in ways that would have been unthinkable in the decade we’re all so fond of. We can buy our old toys on eBay, listen to our favorite nineties tunes on YouTube, stream Clueless on Netflix, and order Airheads in bulk from Amazon. It’s so easy now to embrace, and get a little engulfed by, nostalgia, and us nineties kids are at that age where nostalgia starts to really creep up on you!" True!
Check out some of our favorite looks from the catalogs, plus a few home goods we seriously need. Why did we ever get rid of our blow-up furniture and disco-bead curtains?
