90s Tag

It’s been 30 years since Michael Lucid, then a senior at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, filmed a group of his 13-year-old schoolmates known as the “dirty girls” on VHS. The grainy footage, which captures a group of friends “notorious for their crass behaviour and allegedly bad hygiene,” is a time capsule of 1990s riot grrrl culture, the underground feminist movement rooted in punk rock, DIY zines and feminist activism.  Filmed in 1996, the footage was released in 2000 as an 18-minute documentary and later went viral in 2013 when Lucid uploaded it to YouTube, where it now has 5.7 million views and over 19,000 comments. Shot halfway through the decade that saw the birth of Photoshop, the dirty girls’ rebellion...