Stardoll: The Nostalgia Hit We’re Still Living in
If you were a pre-teen in the naughties, you’re probably still living in a paper-doll world.
‘Dad, I’ve run out of credit’.
It wasn’t my endless friends or first boyfriends that 9-year-old me blew her £5 credit on. It was something much more valuable: I was a wealthy VIP in the Stardoll elite.
Ask a millennial about their childhood clout (using the popular definition of having power, influence, and style), you might get Facebook likes or being able to quote The Hills. In my circle, it was owning the most floral tunics from New Look and having Twilight on DVD — along with one more hobby every femme my age probably engaged in.
I’d get home from school every day and sit down on the family computer, underneath Dad’s lurid pink copy of Irvine Welsh’s Porno and next to my forgotten violin. Waiting for me online was a world of clout, that I was swimming in: Stardoll.com.
Sex, status, and style were the lures promised by Stardoll. Chisel your own porcelain-skinned statuesque icon, snag the wildest virtual garms and deck out her two-bed apartment with enough drip to shit all over your school friends. If you were a VIP it was a clue-in to why you weren’t replying to Abby’s text about geography or that maybe it’d been your birthday lately. But slide in our Stardoll DM’s and you’ll get a response, along with our (probably 50-year-old) boyfriends asking to see our 8008s.
The toe-in-the-water stranger danger was about having not the most friends for your doll, but the friends who’d dropped major dollars on the luxury penthouse apartments. Style over surplus. The best friend list was cut-throat, in retrospect: imagine ranking your friends now? But if some online bitch from Tennessee cut you out of your school friends’ top five, everyone knew some serious drama was going down tomorrow (Tennessee Tilly, 4,000 miles away, must’ve known the shit storm she’d caused).
Also, suite: like a hotel? Were we all prostitutes in the by-the-hour Stardoll Inn? In fairness, there was a weird directionised creativity allowed here: spending hours with that god-awful size slider and individual wooden floor panels, or buying a hundred little stars to write your boyfriend’s name above your head like a hovering neon sign (mine read Jedward). There was baby HTML allowed in your profile description (as long as you didn’t use it to write boobs) and even a way to design your own clothes (which obviously everyone used to draw boobs).
Popular culture has a way of predicting itself. Take a look at the staples of Stardoll’s community: Style, money, a hierarchy of users and friendships for appearances. I’m not saying this was Stardoll’s intention: behind this was a site where you could drool at Zac Efron in his boxers and then dress him up in a stylish jeans/vest combo. But I wouldn’t be shocked if Stardoll was a name that came up in brainstorms when talking about culture that influenced a lot of 18–24 females, too.
I logged onto my Stardoll last week. It’s wild how waved her apartment was, and how many actual pounds I changed into dollars to get there. It’s also wild how much her boho-chic apartment looks like my current flat, down to the leafy greenery on the Ikea-esque white bookshelf and dressing table that were a welcome gift to every Stardoll suite. Ironically, despite her 10 years of lying idle versus my university degree, my avatar is still closer to owner her flat than my broke millennial ass ever will be.
But if you ever see me with a neon sign screaming ‘Bieberlicious’ above my head on a night out, you’ll know where I got my inspo from.
