In Elle, the Legally Blonde prequel, A teen magazine is tossed aside in the garden, its well-worn pages thumbed and flicked into crinkled obedience. An armful of brightly coloured shopping bags swings purposefully to the triumphant beat of a girl's first pair of kitten heels. A phone cord stretches and twists itself aimlessly around the same girl's finger as she gabs for hours on end.
By all accounts, these are the rather mundane images of teen life—albeit teen life of a not-so-distant, but most decidedly bygone era. And Elle captures this bygone era with meticulous precision. But its portrait of '90s teenhood isn't merely about slapping a bunch of trivial '90s-coded aesthetics on our screens. Instead, it's an achingly nostalgic reminder that the analogue adolescence really was something special—and its irreversible loss has stolen some joy from the teen experience for good.
A prequel to the iconic Legally Blonde films, Prime's Elle offers up a glimpse of Woods's Elle before she defied the stereotypes of Harvard Law, proving once and for all that, yes, a pink-obsessed sorority girl with Malibu blonde hair can graduate from law school! Set six years before the film's events, Elle opens in 1995, smack dab in the middle of our heroine's teen years. Elle's perfect pink Californian life hits a snag when, after botching a celebrity's nose job, her plastic surgeon father announces that the family is moving to rainy, dreary Seattle. And so begins Elle's first little taster of life outside of her pink bubble—an appetiser to her journey to come in her Harvard days, if you will.
As Elle bumbles her way through the sea of grunge, plaid, and heavy-set frowns that is her new Seattle school, things aren't always easy. There are mean girls, culture clashes, and complicated school politics to navigate! Of course, there is the argument to be made in favour of our digital world. After all, Elle's analogue world has its drawbacks. She finds herself disconnected from her friends back in L.A., catching up with them only over a crackly car phone. It's a far cry from the steady stream of Snapchats she might have enjoyed today. Upon arriving in Seattle, she is shocked to discover that her wardrobe filled with Clueless-worthy preppy pink is sorely out of fashion—a problem a quick scroll on Instagram would certainly have prevented. And then there's her addiction to Cosmo magazine, which suffers from having to redirect her subscription to a new address. Imagine having to wait weeks on end for your favourite reading material instead of having it at your fingertips—or, indeed, thrown in your face every time you open your phone, like it or not!
For teens today, the problems that come with growing up—the mean girls, the cliques, the growing pains—are only amplified by the addition of an iPhone. Countless studies have shown that the digital world does more to separate and alienate young people than to keep them together. Social media use has been linked to anxiety and depression in UK teens. According to another 2026 study by the Molly Rose Foundation, a third of all teenagers saw suicide, self-harm and eating disorder content on social media in a single week.
It's tough out there for teens, so it's no wonder that they seem to be craving what Elle has. Along with Elle, this year brought Disney +'s Love Story, about the '90s romance of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy—and with it, a resurgence in the '90s minimal aesthetic. Meanwhile, the "Mum, what were you like in the '90s?" trend took off online, inspired, seemingly, by young people asking their Gen X mothers about life in the distant pre-iPhone days.
Other social media trends also embrace the '90s aesthetic, from coastal grandma to Meg Ryan Fall. Then there is the seemingly endless stream of other sequels and prequels and reboots bringing back beloved stories and characters from '90s teen hits—see, for instance, Practical Magic 2, Romy and Michele 2, Freakier Friday, a Bend It Like Beckham sequel, The Devil Wears Prada 2—I could go on. Meanwhile, physical media and "grandma hobbies" are on the rise according to Pinterest Predicts and Etsy search data.
It's easy to see why the simple world of the '90s—the world of Elle—is so resonant for today's teens. Adolescence should be a time of learning and growing and becoming and experimenting. And for Elle, it is. Without the noise of a capitalist-driven algorithm dictating her tastes and sucking up her time, she is free to become her true self and enjoy her adolescence on the way.
Instead of taking inspiration from another TikTok aesthetic trend, she finds her sense of style by looking around her. By trying new things. By experimenting, and sometimes failing. A particularly sweet attempt at finding her Seattle style involves a Nirvana shirt customised with pink hearts over the 'X' eyes. She "leaned into its innate smiliness," people!
Instead of consuming an increasingly chaotic, divisive stream of opinions in the form of TikTok videos, she lives in a world that champions young women's media, whether that be in the form of a teen internship at Cosmo or a handmade culture zine passed around the school.
Instead of trading memes and selfies and DMs, she finds friends in the most unlikely places by—you know—going out and talking to them. There are phone-less house parties. Lively chats in the lunch room. Long chatty phone calls.
Of course, no matter how many sequels, prequels, or TikTok trends we consume, we can never really get the unique freedom of the analogue adolescence back. But Elle reminds us all that being a teen should and can be a little more fun. So, switch off, buy a mag, and call your bestie for a long talk about absolutely nothing. What, like it's hard?
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