Consider Daisy Chain the little sister of Lilith Fair, the industry-disrupting music festival of the 90s created by Sarah McLachlan. Daisy Chain boasted a lineup that included women across genres, from Chappell Roan to Garbage and Doechii to Bikini Kill, and guest appearances from Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette, and Stevie Nicks. 100% of the festival’s net proceeds ($20 million in total!) went to ten nonprofits supporting women and girls.

Forty-five thousand fans braved the California heatwave to trade handmade accessories, snag exclusive merch, and sing their hearts out through every set — and we were there to meet them all.

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Sarah and Callista, friends from San Francisco, show off their Daisy Chain Fields Zine, which featured writing from the artists, DIY crafts, and more:

Laila from Los Angeles — my very first photo subject! I ran up to her as soon I saw her posing outside the entrance.

Sofi and Sage, local BFFs from Orange County, who made their own ribbons for Daisy Chain and are looking forward to heading to NYC for a girls trip this fall.

Isabella, who I met in the very long line for frozen lemonade. Her friend made ribbons for their whole group, and she added a button she got through trading with another festival goer. “People have been so creative and personal with the buttons and bracelets and everything they’re making,” she told me. “Everyone is just so nice… even if you don’t have anything to trade in return!”

Rafaela, who I met in the Depop Oasis. I needed to get a photo of her cat shirt.

In the Etsy Creative Village, I spotted girls getting their hair fairy-fied, and a (very) young fan’s junk journal page that she was in the midst of scrapping together, featuring her concert bucket list. I can only imagine how much longer that list will grow after this weekend, and how special it will be for her to look back on one day.

Ally, Kiera, Kayla, and Chloe — I ran into this lovely group of friends in classic California festival fits, who told me they were most excited to see Olivia Rodrigo and Stevie Nicks.

Katie and Lulu (sisters from Chicago!) — I overheard one of their friends say, “I wish I had an older sister,” and immediately interrupted their convo to give them I <3 Older Sister stickers.

Aracely shows off her Daisy Chain Fields Zine — and her blinged out nails!

Stay tuned for more festival coverage in the fall print edition of Older Sister!

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But before we get into all the Young Adult drama I’ve been consuming, Older Sister’s fall issue will be out in September, and it’s bigger and better than ever! Get ready for back-to-school tips, paper dolls, and how-to guides on everything from confessing your feelings to a crush to designing your own personal curriculum.

We’re also taking a field trip to Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields Music Festival next week in California, where we’ll be interviewing fans for the magazine. If you see us, say hi! We’ll have stickers!

WATCHING: Sterling Point (streaming on Prime Video)

Everyone’s talking about Prime Video’s new end-of-summer, sun-soaked teen drama Sterling Point, and for good reason. Created by Megan Park, who directed the movie My Old Ass (check it out if you haven’t) and produced by teen TV hitmaker Josh Schwartz (The O.C. and Gossip Girl, to name a couple), the show was destined for bingeability, with a killer soundtrack and juicy love triangles. The plot: Annie Jacobson (played by breakout star Ella Rubin) inherits an island in Canada from a mysterious grandfather she’s never met and spends the summer uncovering family secrets.

It was so delicious, I was sure it would be based on a book (as much of YA media has been lately), and was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was a new original. Not that there’s anything wrong with adaptations — Prime has been cornering the teen market lately with adaptations like The Summer I Turned Pretty, Off Campus, Every Year After, and the Legally Blonde prequel Elle — but I think the people yearn for original IPs, which sets Sterling Point apart as the standout of the genre. As teen TV enters a renaissance, it’s clear that young audiences are hungry for stories they don’t already know the ending of. The success of Sterling Point is what happens when creators are given the chance to try something new.

Homework:

• Read: is amazon prime the new cw? by

• Read: creator Megan Park’s interview with The New York Times about creating the media that teenage girls deserve.

  “Young women, especially this generation, are so intelligent ... They see the world in such an interesting way. It would be so sad to not give them the content they deserve and not just the light, fluffy stuff that drives me crazy.”

WATCHING: The O.C. (streaming on Disney+, Hulu, and MAX)

To fill the void that finishing Sterling Point left behind, I started a rewatch of its older sibling The O.C., and I’m happy to report it’s just as fantastic as when I watched it in secret with my best friends in middle school. It also has what I’d argue is the best TV soundtrack of all time: the last few episodes of my rewatch featured Sufjan Stevens, Gwen Stefani, Death Cab for Cutie, and Imogen Heap.

I’m currently on Season 2, which serves up live performances from The Killers and Modest Mouse, Marissa as social chair planning their winter dance (aptly titled “The SnO.C.”), and Olivia Wilde entering as Seth Cohen’s new love interest, sporting some of the wackiest hairstyles I’ve ever seen.

Homework:

Create: a playlist for your own coming-of-age soundtrack

Listen: to the soundtracks from every season of The O.C., courtesy of this 13-hour-long Spotify playlist

LISTENING TO: Audrey Hobert

I’m so addicted to Audrey Hobert’s 12-song album Who’s the Clown? that I had to ban myself from listening to it for the rest of the month so I don’t get sick of it. Her music isn’t for everyone — my Audrey-skeptical friend recently described it as “pure corn” — but I think the corniness is exactly the point, and whatever she’s doing is scratching the itch in my brain that makes me love quirky, punched-up pop music with lyrics that tell a story from beginning to end. You’ve probably already heard her hits “Sue Me” and “Silver Jubilee”, but my favorites are “Bowling alley”, “Phoebe”, and “Drive”, if you need a place to start.

Homework:

Watch: the Bowling alley music video

Watch: this superb TikTok edit of “Silver Jubilee” x Kat Stratford in 10 Things I Hate About You

READING: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Okay, I know I’m over a decade late to this one, but I got a copy so I could keep my YA content binge going (and it was adapted in 2025 for yet ANOTHER teen show on Prime!). I haven’t seen the show, so please, no spoilers on the insane plot twist that everyone keeps promising.

There’s some really good stuff in here — first loves, summer romance, secrets, rich people family drama on an island (Sterling Point vibes) — and it’s all told through the narrator, seventeen-year-old Cadence, who’s recovering from a mysterious accident that she can’t remember, and that her family and friends won’t explain. I’ve been up late reading this every night — I feel like I’m up past my bedtime at summer camp again, hiding under my sheets with a flashlight and the new Harry Potter that my parents mailed me.

Homework:

Write: a short story from the point of view of an unreliable narrator — either someone who's lying to the reader, or who doesn't know the whole truth themselves.

That’s it for Extra Credit this month. I’ll see you in September for the fall issue!

xoxo

Amy

Older Sister Magazine

Picture this: it’s 1995, you’re entering your junior year of high school, and everything is going according to plan. You have an enviable back-to-school closet, the potential of a perfect first kiss, and a three-point plan to rule the school with your best friends and a stack of trusty Cosmopolitan magazines by your side. That is, until your parents suddenly uproot your family, plucking you out of your bright Beverly Hills bubble and dropping you down in rainy Seattle.

This is where we meet the newest iteration of our beloved Elle Woods in Prime Video’s Elle, a prequel to Legally Blonde that imagines our hero at sixteen, a hot pink fish-out-of-water among a sea of skateboarders, flannels, earth tones, and apathy.

In classic Elle fashion, she attempts to win over her new classmates with wide-eyed charm, relentless optimism and lavender-scented paper, but can’t figure out why everyone’s acting so weird towards her. She even tries her hand at DIY-ing a Nirvana t-shirt, only to later learn what the term “poser” means. Down but never out, Elle decides to do what she does best: event planning. She’s determined to organize the school’s first-ever homecoming pep rally, setting out to revive the not-so-cheerful cheer squad with new choreography, and rally students around the closest thing they have to a “big game” (a cross country meet).

Where Have All the Cheerleaders Gone?

The lack of school spirit is not a fictional problem. Open just about any student newspaper in America and you’ll find teen journalists who are fed up with a lack of connectedness (what one student paper called “the Nonchalance Epidemic”) and the idea that trying is embarrassing and caring is cringe. Search “nonchalant” on TikTok and you’ll see thousands of videos like “3 Ways to Be More Nonchalant (School Edition)”, from teenagers earnestly explaining, on camera, how to look like you don’t care. The WikiHow page for “How to be Nonchalant: 14 Steps (with Pictures)” has over half a million views. That’s a lot of people trying really hard to look like they’re not trying at all.

Forced nonchalance has real consequences. Education researchers at the Aspen Institute published a report on what they call “a crisis of belonging” in American schools: nearly 40% of high schoolers say they don’t feel connected to their schools at all — impacting everything from attendance and grades to self-esteem and social well-being. (It doesn’t get better with age, either: students at Harvard, teenage Elle’s future alma mater, graded their school’s spirit at a dismal 2.47 out of 5 in a campus survey, with one respondent begging: “We need literally any mascot! Literally any!”)

The good news? The crisis of belonging can be remedied. Psychologists Carol Goodenow and Kathleen Grady defined “school belonging” as the extent to which students feel “accepted, respected, included, and supported” by the people around them. And research shows that school belonging grows when students get to express their individuality and pursue what genuinely interests them – which is exactly what a certain blonde transfer student is about to figure out.

Trying Rocks

The pep rally only comes together once Elle learns to relinquish her party planning perfectionism and allows her new friends to do homecoming their way. She starts paying attention to what her classmates already love: their interests, their music taste, their unique talents. And after pulling it all off – complete with a performance by the cheerleaders of “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen – one of her classmates remarks, “I didn’t know trying could be so rewarding!” to which Elle quips, “Yeah, trying rocks!” The lesson is clear: caring is cool, indifference is not.

This fall, I invite you to redefine school spirit the Elle Woods way: by noticing what the people around you are good at, and showing up for them with enthusiasm – at the cross country meet, the debate tournament, the musical, the art show. Join a club or start your own, try out for that team, be your friends’ personal cheerleader, and maybe even throw your own pep rally.

What, like it’s hard?

Elle is streaming now on Prime Video.

Photo Credits: @fishburndem, @annakoblish, @frankie_marin

Most of the 2000s-inspired fashion flooding your feed right now gets the nostalgia angle right, but misses the quality behind why we loved those pieces in the first place. Naré Vardanyan noticed the gap between what these brands were selling and what she remembered loving about early 2000s style: heavyweight cotton instead of polyester, saturated color instead of neutrals, and low-rise that’s really low-rise. Born in Armenia and raised in Seattle, Naré, 22, was studying business at the University of Washington when she decided to take a risk and create her own clothing line, instead of following the traditional finance career her degree was setting her up for.

The details of Wear Naré’s cotton striped sets trace back to Naré’s childhood, specifically her older cousin’s closet full of PINK, Hollister, and Abercrombie, the kind of effortlessly girly, quintessential mall clothes that made a teenager look like the coolest person alive to a younger girl.

Older Sister talked to Naré about turning her thrifting hobby into a clothing line, the moments of doubt that come with choosing a riskier career path, and what she wants our readers to remember about being a teenager right now.

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When did you first get the idea to design these pieces?
I’d been toying with the idea of launching a clothing line for years while studying at the business school at the University of Washington, but it started to feel real once I began posting my thrifting endeavors on social media and connected with a community of girls who also missed the color, quality, and youthful energy of early 2000s clothing. Around the same time, I kept noticing brands that had been bought up by private equity roll out “throwback” lines, still made of plastic instead of real cotton, with low-rise that felt more like high-rise, and no transparency on how and where the pieces were being made. Noticing that gap in the market is what pushed me to create the first drop of Wear Naré in the summer of 2025, and the brand fully launched a year later this summer.

What design elements of 2000s clothing (fabric, silhouette, colorways, etc.) inspired you during the creative process?
So many things in our day to day — cars, furniture, clothes — went from being full of color to fading into a bland beige, and I didn’t want that for Wear Naré. Silhouette-wise, I loved the idea of creating a low-rise fold-over waistband, it felt like a nod to some of my favorite clothes from childhood. This meant bringing back thick, heavyweight cotton instead of the polyester that so many brands have switched to while hoping you wouldn’t notice. It also meant saturated color, bold stripes, and unapologetic color combinations, but it also taps into the premise of dressing for yourself before you decided what was socially acceptable to wear.

How has the production and launch process been so far?
Launch has been the most fulfilling and amazing experience of my life. I’d had a photo pinned on my Pinterest for about a year that I kept referring back to when thinking about branding for Wear Naré. I ended up finding the exact photographer (shoutout Anna Koblish) who shot the photo, and nearly talked myself out of messaging her, assuming she’d never respond. A good reminder I keep coming back to: the worst that could happen is she says no. She turned out to be just as excited as I was, and shooting with her became one of the best days of the whole process. It was the epitome of everything I envisioned my grown-up life would look like when I was a kid, surrounded by inspiring girls who genuinely wanted to be part of the brand, doing a shoot I’d only ever dreamt about. The difficult days are usually all mental, filled with occasional doubts about whether I should’ve just stuck with my finance degree instead of taking the risk. But my incredibly supportive family, friends and even strangers constantly remind me that I’m on the right path.

What’s next for Wear Naré? Any new designs you’re brainstorming about / working on next?
I’m currently working on some fun pieces for the winter, along with collabs with cafes, boutiques, etc. Stay tuned and follow @wearnare and my personal account @narevardanyann on Instagram to stay updated :)

Any message you’d like to share with our readers?
I think being a teenager in this era can be incredibly confusing. You get advice from every direction and you end up feeling like you’re back at square one. It’s always a good reminder that you’re here to feel every moment, in pursuit of whatever your dreams may be, even if you don’t know what they are yet. Don’t forget that! See your friends when you’re sad, talk to strangers when you’re bored, go outside when something feels off, wear fun outfits that inspire you, and just have fun. Everything else will come as it should.

Hannah Pieper, aka Vanilla Chateau, is a cake artist and illustrator based in Berlin with a background in fashion design, styling, and photography. She builds dreamlike worlds influenced by surrealism, Victorian romance, and the strange edges of girlhood, dreaming up cakes that look like technicolor fairytales. Imperfection is the whole point of her craft: each cake is temporary and singular, made to be seen, touched, and tasted before it disappears. For our first Artist Spotlight feature, we talked to Hannah about the films and designers feeding her imagination, working with a medium that doesn’t last, and why she never wants to make the same thing twice.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

I’m inspired by fairytales, fables, and memories of growing up on a farm. I’m fascinated by creating poetic worlds where innocence meets darkness and beauty exists within imperfection.

My work is deeply influenced by the uncanny — dolls, surrealism, Victorian romance, gothic femininity, and the aesthetics of girlhood. I’m inspired by films such as The Virgin Suicides, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Alice by Jan Švankmajer, as well as the dreamy worlds of Sofia Coppola. Fashion is another constant source of inspiration, from vintage Betsey Johnson to designers like Simone Rocha.

What’s your creative process like?

I create dreamlike worlds that explore themes of girlhood, nostalgia, hyperfemininity, and fantasy. Bunnies, lambs, and other recurring creatures appear throughout my work like characters from a half-remembered dream, carrying a sense of innocence, fragility, and vulnerability.

I usually start with a vague image or feeling in my mind, but the idea often transforms throughout the process. The execution is the most exciting part because it reveals whether an idea truly works. I love the element of surprise and allowing unexpected details to become part of the final piece.

While I’m baking, I always listen to music that helps me enter the atmosphere of the cake I’m creating.

What is it like working with cakes as a medium?

I love that every cake is temporary and unique. It’s an emotional medium that engages all the senses — it can be seen, touched, smelled, tasted, and shared with others.

I’m drawn to imperfect cakes with details that give them personality and a human touch. I’m constantly experimenting with new techniques, textures, and color combinations. I never want to repeat the same work or copy my previous creations; I always want my practice to evolve and discover new forms of expression.

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has spent a decade researching and writing about girls and their bedrooms. In the Girls’ Room, her latest essay collection, is the culmination of that work — essays on bedroom culture from the 90s to today.

For our first print issue, Older Sister Magazine spoke to the author about bedroom culture, what she’s learned in her research, and what was in her bedroom as a teen.

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What inspired you to write about girls and their bedrooms?

Since I was a teenager, I was always fascinated by the stuff we made in our bedrooms, whether that was shrines to our favorite celebrities, mixed CDs, fanfiction, or zines. When I was in college, I discovered zinemaking and the community around zinemaking in Chicago — and to me, there was this inherent connection between amateur-made media like zines, blogs, or vlogs and the bedroom. While I was in the early stages of doing my Ph.D., I watched the documentary about Kathleen Hanna, The Punk Singer, and I was really struck by how she articulated the place of bedroom culture in her personal history of making stuff. I wanted to know if I could track the bedroom as this creative space, this archival space, this space of becoming and finding oneself through 90s-era media like zines and comics and film. And of course, that expanded into the book as it exists now — covering bedroom culture from the 90s to now.

Was there anything that surprised you in your research?

I think what surprised me the most was just how few people had written about or created scholarship about girls’ bedroom culture. For me, bedroom culture was just so obvious as something that really shaped everything from modern pop culture to the social Internet, so when I started researching this book around 2013, I was shocked to find that there were only a handful of scholarly articles about it. I really had to invent a lot of the language around bedroom culture, and that was honestly kind of scary, because I didn’t want to mischaracterize this element of culture that I find so impactful and influential.

A girl’s room is a sacred space, our respite from the changing world around us, where our mirrors watch us grow up. How do our bedrooms function as both a sanctuary and as a reflection of ourselves?

I think for a lot of teenagers — and especially teenage girls — their bedroom is the place where they first feel safe expressing themselves, whether that’s through decorating it in a particular way, or exploring something they really love like music or films or, I guess, internet rabbit holes now. Our bedrooms provide us a safe space to do that work of consuming and creating media on our own terms. Even if you weren’t afforded a bedroom of your own, it exists now as this space of fantasy and play that I think anyone can access at any time. I think about that a lot with the rise of trends like “nostalgia rooms” where millennial women gather items from their teenage years or childhood that they maybe didn’t have access to at the time.

Of all the decades you explore in the book — the 90s, Y2K & the 2010s, and now — do you have a favorite? One you’re drawn the most to?

When I was researching the book and writing the earliest drafts, it was definitely the 90s because I love zines so much and I loved unearthing all this girl-made media from that era when I was in archives or digging through personal collections. But now I think I’m more interested in Y2K with all the Y2K nostalgia we get online and then also the ways that that era really connected the girls’ room to the Internet in a way that definitely shaped how we use social media today. I was also a teenager in the 2000s myself and my new project is a lot more autobiographical, so I’m finding myself really going back and listening to records from that era or rewatching the movies I was just beginning to discover and obsess over.

What was in your bedroom as a teenage girl?

A ton of fairy posters — like 2000s-era fairy posters — and a huge collage of images I had found online from the Lord of the Rings movies and printed out on the family computer to paste up on my ceiling. It was massive. I also had this really cool record player that had a tape deck embedded in it so I could make mixtapes.

Anything else you want our readers to know?

That they can follow me on Instagram @girlgutters, subscribe to Internet Bedroom, my newsletter about girl culture, the internet, and nostalgia at internetbedroom.substack.com, and get their own copies of my essay collections, In the Girls’ Room: Bedroom Culture from the 90s to Now and The Internet is Our Bedroom at internetbedroom777.com <3

If you’re like me and spend the majority of your time on the internet saving ideas for DIY arts & crafts, you may have noticed an uptick in snail mail clubs making their way across your screens. Girls, artists, and creatives around the world are creating monthly mail clubs to connect with like-minded, creative people, sending handmade art prints, stickers, and keepsakes straight to your mailbox. We talked to snail mail club founders about the creative process, the experience of running a business, and why analog connection is making a comeback.

Purrtty Sweet Mail Club

Los Angeles based artist and designer Marisol Muro is the reigning queen of Marisoland: a playful, technicolor dreamland where creatures run wild – especially cats!

Marisol’s Purrtty Sweet Mail Club delivers monthly stickers, postcards, and other little goodies to brighten your day, featuring her vintage-inspired furry little friends.

“I recently saw the rise of snail mail and how artists are able to share their art in a very affordable way,” Marisol says about starting the club. “If you really love an artist, it’s such a treat to get a letter of their work, and you get to support them as well!”

Marisol’s creative process is seemingly constant. She’s always collecting photos, notes, doodles, and anything she finds interesting that makes her mind light up.

“I’m a really curious person, and I’ve found this is somewhat of a super power,” she says. “I love storytelling, connecting with people, and experiencing new things. It’s a never ending source of inspiration that keeps me creating.”

Fiorenza and Friends

Elena Fiorenza Gatti is an independent artist from Chicago whose work never shies away from the personal stuff, like mental health and well-being, with the hope of making people feel a little less alone.

The Fiorenza and Friends Club grew out of that same instinct. “I wanted to start a mail club as a way to meaningfully connect with my community,” she says. “I think directly dropping off an envelope from my desk to your home, packed with so much love and gratitude, is the best way I can build my community even more authentically, and hopefully brighten someone’s day.”

Her creative process has no hard-and-fast rules: “I create when I can and want to, and I create even when I can’t and don’t want to,” she says. “It’s just as automatic as breathing.”

Running the mail club has been one of the most challenging things she’s taken on with Fiorenza Art, and also one of the most rewarding. The emails from members telling her it’s the highlight of their month remind her that her hard work pays off, and she feels lucky to have pen pals all across the country.

Craftoholic Mail Club

As a self-described multi-passionate creative, Minna Abalian was struggling to choose which direction to take her art in, before asking herself: who says you can’t do it all? She branded herself as the Craftoholic, building her own business around the freedom to try all the different crafts she’d always wanted to learn.

The Craftoholic Mail Club grew as a way to share her crafts and create a community that encourages slowing down and getting back to the joy of working with your hands. Each month of the mail club focuses on a different art form, style, or motif, with curated mailers that teach members everything from calligraphy to pattern making.

What Minna didn’t expect was how fast the club would grow, or how many hats she’d wear at once: artist, businesswoman, and content creator. But what Minna finds most special is getting to hear from people about how much cheer the mail brings them: “I wouldn’t trade the endless hours of work to get it on their doorstep for anything,” she says. “Never underestimate what a little color can do to brighten someone’s day.”

this is our summer cover story. shop the print issue and read more here!

If you want to hold it in your hands - and it’s gorgeous, why wouldn’t you! - you can buy it HERE!

Here’s what’s inside our summer issue:

• Our cover story on Snail Mail Clubs and the girls who run them

• An interview with Rachel Moss, author of In The Girls’ Room

• How to fight summer FOMO

• DIY crafts and a guide to sustainable beach-combing

• An interview with our first ROLE MODEL, actress & writer India Burns

• Movies, books, and a playlist for the season ahead

• Ask Fifi: advice from the most fabulous cat in NYC

• and SO MUCH MORE!

We’ll be sharing some of our features here on Substack - stay tuned :)

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Read my Editor’s Letter here:

xo,

Amy

hey you!

older sister mag’s first issue is almost here — and we want YOUR work!

we’re putting together our end of school year edition and looking for submissions inspired by: change, endings, goodbyes, last days, graduation, the summer ahead, growing up, and moving on.

we want your:

• poetry, creative writing & short essays

• photography & art

• playlists, books & movies

• anything else you feel like sending!

deadline: sunday, may 24th

send to: oldersistermag@gmail.com or submit via substack

and don’t forget — you can also write to our advice columnist in residence, fifi!

xoxo,

amy

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older sister is a new magazine bringing back media that’s intentional, fun, and made with girls in mind.

what we’re about:

• mental and physical wellness

• self-concept & identity

• style, beauty & self-care

• friendships, family, & relationships

• how-to guides, quizzes, & advice columns

• crafting, journaling, activities & creative prompts

• books, music, TV & movies

• poetry, photography, art & design

accepting submissions & questions via substack or oldersistermag@gmail.com !

xoxo,

@oldersistermag