Glacier Girl with Katharine Hamnett in Grace Miceli’s ‘teenage bedroom’ installation – School of Doodle workshop at Protein Studios, April 2016
Teenage girls are very hard done by. Society is obsessed with telling them that they are wrong, and that their interests are stupid (see every target of public ridicule, from One Direction to Kylie Jenner). They are not listened to, they are sidelined, they are often not encouraged, and most of all they are not taken seriously. It is really difficult, as a teenage girl, to want to put yourself out there, and to be confident in the things that you like and that you create. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was a teenage girl and I know that I did not put myself out there all that much, and am still not always that confident in the things I like and create. I was, in hindsight, much more concerned with peer approval and generally pissing about with my mates. I wasn’t doing anything notably cool, I certainly wasn’t very ~woke~.
Almost a decade(!) after I first became a teenage girl, and pushing three years since I stopped being one, I feel like a lot has changed. Be that through the rise of the internet, a general cultural shift, or perhaps I’m just noticing it more now than I did when I was a teen myself, but teen girls all over the world are doing so much cool shit.