Maxwell Neely-Cohen is a writer, musician and designer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, SSENSE and BOMB. He’s currently a fellow at the Harvard Law School Library of Innovation Lab, and producing work in theater, technology, video games and performance.
This interview took place back in July 2023, so while we talked about current trends – they were at the time. Life comes at you fast. And the trend cycle is even faster these days. Read on for our thoughts on Clueless, skaters and subcultures.
Some key scenes we’ll be discussing or referring to:
CHER’S “BAGGY PANTS” SPEECH
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT (CHRISTIAN ENTERS)
You wanted to discuss 90s movie depictions of what “people thought skaters were like.” And you brought up Clueless. Were they represented accurately?
They’re not. On the one hand, the depiction in Clueless isn't accurate, but it's not inaccurate in the way these portrayals normally are.
How so?
Typically, 90s media portrayals of skaters tend to go in this over-mediated, X Games direction. And even though the X Games didn't exist when Clueless was being made1, there were still the beginnings, I think, of that marketing push. There’s the scene in the movie where it took some of the fashion excesses from the early 90s — a time when the skateboarding industry was in the midst of a huge economic crash. And the number of skaters was way less. It was at that time the dominant form of skateboarding was kind of evolving: it was street skateboarding, which is not in the movie. That was all happening when everything had crashed. The number of skaters was astronomically less and so the fashion was mediated more quickly by a smaller number of people.
So they weren’t wearing baggy pants?
Not that baggy. I think Clueless was merging a bunch of things between skaters and stoners.
Ravers too.
Definitely. And white early 90s hip hop fans. It's all in there.
I always thought that Clueless, especially at the start, was a social observation through Cher’s POV. And I wonder if skaters are depicted this way because she groups people who don’t look like her. Like she lumps the skaters, stoners and ravers all into the same category. I mean, she even overlooks so many tells from Christian: she’s so fixated on the way he looks that she completely misses the fact that he’s gay. I feel like later on, when she undergoes this transformation and begins hanging out with people she never associated with, she starts to see the nuances.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I always thought of this particular scene as a way to set up Christian – like it’s setting up the introduction that can then set up the eventual punch line.
She’s melded every dude she isn’t attracted to into this one guy she pushes away. High school is one of your earliest introductions to social hierarchies. So whether you like it or not, you start categorizing, classifying and lumping people together too.
But I think there is an element of irony in that.
How so?
I'm reminded of this one piece in The Cut years ago about skaters as sex symbols.
Or unexpected sex symbols (at the time)?
Yeah. And that's the part I think is kind of funny about the Clueless portrayal.
It wasn’t true in Cher’s world though. Despite the internal changes, she doesn’t end up with a skater. But today, things have changed.
Exactly. I remember during the 2020 protests when all the Philly skaters were doing this skate-through. And I forget who tweeted this out, but it went something like this:
I regret to inform you how attracted I am to this [the skaters].
And then there was this reply that was, like:
Skaters: good politics, great dick, terrible boyfriends. What's not to like?
Everyone at some point has tried to date a skater, right? If you aren’t attracted to them, then you’re cribbing their style. Or if you’re working for a luxury brand, you’re making money off them.
I'm a little younger than that Clueless world and saw that world change: it was not cool then, but it wasn’t ostracized either. And I mean, I do consciously remember the moment in the 9th grade when people figured out that skaters had abs. And it was very confusing for everyone but us. They were all like, it turns out they're super hot.
And fit.
And it’s like well yeah, all they do is fucking skate all day. Are you shocked?
How does Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) compare? There’s more of a scene there?
Kids is much more realistic because the actors were all wearing their own clothes.
Yeah. I can’t remember if there were shoelace belts, but the baggy pants were much less exaggerated.
It was definitely the shoelace belt era. The skater thing is hard to talk about now because the skaters won. They won. I don't know what to do with that information and it's kind of an awkward state of affairs when you see items like shoelace belts being sold in places now.
Really?
I've seen it. It's weird to me because I remember back in 2001 when Zach Lyons, who I went to high school with and who became a professional skateboarder, came in one day and was just like, I lost my belt and realized I could just put a fucking shoelace through these things. You know? It’s weird to see it all happening.
So I just realized – for the people who don’t know – what exactly were your ties to the skater community? Have you stuck with it or do you still have friends in that world? Are they coming to you with scene reports?
For most of my life, being a skater was my only subcultural and fashion identity. It wasn’t intentional. I was just a skater. In a way, it meant that I didn’t have to worry. I could be in very fashionable scenes and subcultures and it was fine because I was a skater. You got a free pass. That was most of my life until I got too old to skate. But it’s also no longer a unified subcultural identity. It’s much more random now.
It feels like a lot of people are borrowing from that kind of look or that kind of sensibility. Is it more a part of streetwear?
Yeah, it definitely is.
Cher never ends up with a skater, or a jock or Christian for that matter. She ends up with a grungy/granola, idealistic law student. Sometimes the people you’re attracted to can surprise you?
Well, I mean, I do think it's interesting how there aren't, there aren't any jocks in Clueless.
Wait a minute.
That's the most fascinating thing to me about it. It just takes the jocks out of the equation.
Maybe the gym teacher? (I’m kidding.) Is it the only American teen movie with no jocks or varsity gear?
The most American teen movie trope is just completely removed. But it makes sense because it’s Beverly Hills!
I just realized we discussed social hierarchies without bringing up class dynamics. Are they in public school or private school?
It's a public school. I know people who've gone to it. It's Beverly Hills High – where Breckin Meyer (who plays Travis) went. I also found out this wild thing about Breckin Meyer and it’s that, leading up to Clueless, he was a huge goth who slept in a coffin. I’ve never found any photos, but he talks about it in interviews all the time.
Woah. Wait, isn’t Cher from a gated community or a highly exclusive ZIP code?
There are spots in America where, because local taxes fund public schools, there are these public schools that are very, very, very rich. And a lot of people end up sending their kids to public school instead of private school.
So this adds another layer to what we’ve been discussing because these are not people that Cher's grown up with at all, except for Dionne.
There’s the distinction, which in the nineties was less of a distinction than it is today: Cher’s dad was corporate lawyer rich, but he's not a billionaire. I guess the distinction I'm making is that the private school kids are somewhere else. To put it another way – and this is going to sound dumb – Cher doesn’t exist in the Bret Easton Ellis universe.
I’ve always thought Beverly Hills High was the perfect setting because it fulfills the Jane Austen brief in that they’re landed gentry and not the aristocracy. There’s a bigger thing out there which is not in the film.
We’ve been talking a lot about clothes and cliques, and now I want to talk about closets. There’s Cher’s closet at the start of Clueless. And I eventually want to talk about your style.
Do you know what my partner and I did with our closets? We were on Avery Trufelman’s podcast talking about this: we made the closet from Clueless. We digitized our wardrobes.
What happens if you lose something or get rid of an item of clothing?
I actually have to update mine just because I've been getting rid of so much. I'm at a point, where I’m just wearing Issey Miyaki, Yohji Yamamoto and Rick Owens. That’s it. And as many people have pointed out, I don't wear Rick Owens in the hypebeast way. I wear it in the way that Rick actually intended, so I can look like the male version of balletcore. I often read as dancer. But I’m currently cataloging every single item of clothing like a librarian.
So how has your approach to dressing changed from before – when you could blend into surrounding skaters?
I’m painting with what I have, in a way. I think I can still read as an aging skater at times. But then like 3 or 4 years ago, I finally had the money to buy really nice clothes. I remember back in 2013, when I didn’t. I was complaining to my friend, Katherine Bernard, who used to write for Vogue, that I didn’t know what to wear. Katherine was like, Max, I think you need to start wearing a lot of Rick Owens. And I couldn’t buy it at the time. Whereas now, I can. I realized there is no cheaper version of it. The Issey Miyaki knock-offs are especially bad.
In Clueless, clothing is such a different way to mark how people have sort of evolved internally in a lot of ways. At the end, Cher has ditched the hats and matching sets for something more toned-down and polished. She’s figured out how to do the same.
I think yes. There’s a whole thing about before and after and self-improvement, right? But unlike Tai’s extreme makeover, Cher’s is more subtle and internal.
We talked about Kids being a more realistic portrayal of skaters, but the actors were wearing their clothes. I’m trying to think of any depictions of skaters or subcultures where a costume designer really nailed it.
Roger Burton’s work on Hackers. That came out around the same time Clueless did and at the time, hackers actually didn’t really have a subculture. So he went to New York and London, found every other subculture, pulled all their benefits and the rest is history. There were no early 90s hackers who looked like lesbian-era Angelina Jolie.
The first X Games was in 1995. https://www.xgames.com/our-history
The interview I didn't know I needed... love it.
This was such a fun read.