90’s Kid
The 90s catch heat they don’t deserve. Everyone talks about the bad parts now—the fashion disasters, the haircuts, daytime TV hell, that dread around Y2K, SMS charges eating your entire paycheck at 19 cents a message. On the surface it looks like a genuinely bad decade, a cultural low point we should all be embarrassed about.
But if you actually let yourself sit with the nostalgia instead of dismissing it, something else comes back. Star Wars. Sailor Moon. The Game Boy—that gray brick that never died. The Turtles. Tomb Raider. Tamagotchi. Space Jam. Pokémon. Friends. Bruce Lee movies. The Simpsons. Everything with Schwarzenegger. Jurassic Park. Silent Hill. Michael Jackson. The actual stuff that shaped me, that got into my bones, that I still think about. The 90s weren’t a wasteland at all. They were full of things that mattered.
Rachid Lotf, an artist, packed all of it—or his version of it—into a single image he called 90’s Kid.
Not the polished curated version. Not ironic distance. Just: here’s everything I loved. Here’s what made me. That’s it.
The detail hits you in waves. First you spot the obvious things—the Final Fantasy VII poster, whatever. Then you get curious and start looking closer. Hello Kitty? Monopoly on the floor. A Furby wedged on a shelf. The more you dig, the more specific details emerge, and you realize how personal it is—his specific taste, his specific arrangement of what matters. It could be your image too, different in the details but probably not that different in spirit.
There’s no irony in the image, no performance. Just a person saying, These things made me,
and meaning it. I look at it and find myself everywhere—not because his specific taste is mine, but because we grew up in the same glossy landscape of references and objects. The 90s created enough monoculture that the details can be personal while the feeling is shared. You see your own nostalgia in his nostalgia.
I could buy it as a poster. Probably will. But the real moment is the looking itself—spending time with what actually mattered, what actually shaped you, stripped of the jokes and the dismissal. The image does that. It doesn’t apologize for loving the things it loves.