everything about you
on one direction, self-identity, and childhood
I was on the bus home when I heard the news from, of all things, a group chat. That a member of One Direction had died on a random autumn weekday in my twenties would have been inconceivable to my thirteen-year old self, and was nearly as shocking to me now. I got off the bus and called my sister in New York, where we stared at each other on our phone screens, saying nothing. In that moment I felt I had stepped briefly outside of the world around me—London, streetlights, car horns—and into one I had left behind as a teenager.
I admit I felt a knee-jerk response of embarrassment when I had the idea yesterday to write an essay on One Direction. That it feels trite and frivolous to be affected by the death of a member of a boy band (and, admittedly, a member whose career I hardly kept up with when the band split), when there are vastly more worthy political, social, and moral issues on which to focus attention. How silly.
Yet.
How often “silly” is an insult leveled at girls for having interests deemed inferior. Because the truth is, One Direction is as inextricable from my childhood as colored skinny jeans, summer camp, or the death of my grandmother. That to minimise or brush aside their impact on my teen self is to reject the role of childhood in crafting self-identity, to become one of the very adults whose judgement I used to fear—someone who doesn’t take seriously the interests, activities, and inner worlds of children (and in particular, girls).
You would be hard-pressed to find another entity that rivals the fierce loyalty and raw power of teenage girl fandom. Yet girls’ interests are relentlessly mocked1 for their perceived insignificance, even as corporations rely on their purchasing power to sell products and drive cultural trends23. This isn’t to say that girlhood interests matter because of their power in the economic market, but that their power in the economic market speaks to the extent to which we systemically disregard young women: that even in a culture where their passions line corporate pockets, girls’ interests are dismissed and ridiculed. As culture writer Constance Grady put it: ‘to be a teenage girl is to simultaneously be pop culture’s ultimate punching bag, cash cow, and gatekeeper.’4
To be a fan of One Direction was often to be reduced to a schoolgirl with a crush, but the dynamics at play were bigger than that. Though fans would often introduce themselves with which boy they liked, they described it typically as which boy they were—I was a ‘Harry girl’, whilst my sister was a ‘Louis girl’ who told everyone she was a ‘Niall’. The lens of romantic desire served to allow girls to inhabit alternative models of self-identity than the ones for which they had been socialised. Even as external discussions around their fanbase remained misogynistic, One Direction the band largely embodied a socially progressive form of masculinity. Their open affection with one another, playful physicality, and willingness to embrace their teen girl audience not only put them at odds with the traditional masculine behaviour many young girls expected from boys they knew, but also allowed girls to mark out specific band members as substitutes for themselves. Where teenage boys at school are often allowed to and expected to be loud, to horse around and make messes, girls are expected to engage in gentler forms of play.5 Supporting One Direction meant being able to engage, even indirectly, with a style of play from which girls are typically excluded. To watch the boys in the band dance around on stage pouring water bottles over one another’s heads, tackling each other, and yelling was to be invited to vicariously experience the freedom of boyhood. As American professor George Lipitz notes in Footsteps in the Dark : The Hidden Histories of Popular Music: “the investment in condemning boy bands stems as much from defensive heterosexism as it does from aesthetic conviction”.6 In other words, the dismissal of boy bands comes not only from progressive form of masculinity they represent, but in the access they provide young female fans to alternative self-identities.
I am still made up of the things that mattered to me at age thirteen, even as time shrinks the percentage of which I self-identify with them. As Anais Nin wrote: “I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles”7; many of those ‘moods and sensations’ that made up my teen self have become valuable memories: my mom using her hand as a microphone, singing the chorus of “What Makes You Beautiful” on the drive to school, then passing her “mic” to me to sing the verses. Leaving the house at 6AM for the drive to Long Island’s Sunrise Mall One Direction meet-and-greet, sleep dust in my eyes. The Silly String band members sprayed on the crowd (that I pocketed and later enclosed in a ziploc bag within my 2012 CD case of Up All Night). The old velvet seats at the Beacon Theatre in New York City that squeak as several thousand girls jump to their feet and yell with unfettered joy. Staring at Tumblr until my eyes burn, scrolling tour gifs and fanfiction and Mr. X threats. Begging my parents to let me buy a specific top from Zara because Louis’ girlfriend had the “exact same one”. Jumping on my sister’s bed with her, blasting the music: flailing limbs, collapsing to the carpet breathlessly, rug burns on our elbows.
Of course, nostalgia often flattens its object8 to better fit the narrative we want to tell. That One Direction was a band packaged and marketed to us by the music industry, and that this industry exploited these teenage band members for their profit is abundantly clear, made infinitely more tragic by Liam Payne’s sudden death. The same dismissed love teenagers had for the band was weaponised by music producers like Simon Cowell; to profit from the insatiable appetites of fans, Cowell and the band’s management pushed them onto an unsustainable hamster wheel of concerts, studio sessions, press tours, meet-and-greets, TV appearances, and advertisements. In the five years One Direction was a band, they made five albums and went on four world tours. As Nikki Peach notes in a recent piece for Grazia, “[music executives] treat young stars like products in a toy factory and want to flog them while they’re valuable and discard them when they’re not.”9
Last week, my sister and I stayed on the phone for a few more moments before saying goodbye. I resumed my journey to my flat, and it struck me that the life I have built for myself is partially thanks to One Direction. My close relationship with my sister, some of my dearest friendships, even probably my move to live in the UK, are all owed in part to this band—a band that I loved when I was just a kid who spent a lot of time in my bedroom, waiting impatiently for life to arrive. Now, here I was, in the midst of that life, and I longed suddenly to sit in the corner of my childhood bedroom again. But that iteration of my space is gone, the posters crumpled and walls long since painted over. It feels as though my teenage self has emerged from a dormant state to find that there is really nowhere left for her to go.
The week went on. As friends and I spent it sharing memories and clips and jokes we haven’t thought of in a decade, I remembered the importance of memories I once dismissed as insignificant—the sing-along drives, the dancing, the concerts, the fun. And among the shock and sadness is also a freedom of expression I didn’t possess as a child, and a resounding sense of gratitude: how profoundly lucky I am to have once been a teenage girl.
Heaf, Jonathan. “This One Direction Interview Got Us Death Threats.” British GQ, www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/one-direction-gq-covers-interview.
Simms, Brad. “Why Teenage Girls Are the Key to Cultural Relevance.” Forbes, www.forbes.com/sites/bradsimms/2024/05/30/teenage-girls-are-the-key-to-cultural-relevance/.
Connecting with the Culture Makers: How Young Women Are Setting Trends and Driving Consumer Behavior. GALE, 2 May 2024.
Grady, Constance. “Is the Teen Girl the Most Powerful Force in Pop Culture?” Vox, 21 June 2021, www.vox.com/the-highlight/22352860/teenage-girls-pop-culture-tiktok-olivia-rodrigo-addison-rae.
Carolyn P. Edwards, et al. “Play Patterns and Gender”. The Encyclopedia of Women and Gender San Diego: Academic Press, 2001, Volume 2, pp. 809-815.
Lipsitz, George. Footsteps in the Dark : The Hidden Histories of Popular Music. Minneapolis, Mn, University Of Minnesota Press, Cop, 2007. p.7.
Nin, Anaïs. The Diary of AnaǐS Nin, 1944-1947. Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971.
“The Psychology of Nostalgia and the Continuity of Self.” Neuroscience Of, www.neuroscienceof.com/human-nature-blog/nostalgia-psychology-memory-continuity.
“It Is Time to Finally Accept That Fame That Comes at a Young Age Is Almost Impossible to Navigate.” Grazia, 2024, graziadaily.co.uk/celebrity/news/child-fame-dangers/. Accessed 22 Oct. 2024.