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Short abstract

Children seem to grow up earlier, while teenagers enter adulthood later. Are algorithms, changing media and consumer culture pulling our ideas of age apart? A look at the growing gap between cultural and social age - and what might come after the teenager.

Long abstract

Something strange seems to be happening to age.

Ten-year-olds follow skincare routines, fashion aesthetics and influencers that not long ago would have been associated with teenagers. At the same time, a twelve-year-old, a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-two-year-old may now encounter many of the same cultural references through their social media feeds.

It would be easy to say that young people are simply growing up faster. Research suggests a more complicated picture. Large longitudinal studies show that teenagers are actually delaying many behaviours traditionally associated with growing up, including dating, paid work, driving and spending time outside the home without their parents.

This contradiction is where my talk begins. I want to bring research on adolescent behaviour, age compression, tween culture and social media together with what I see in my own work in fashion design and trend research for young consumers.

Categories such as “tween” and “teenager” have never been only about biology. Media, fashion and consumer culture have played a role in defining what different ages look like and how they behave. I am interested in what happens to these categories when personalised feeds increasingly cut across traditional age segmentation.

Could cultural age and social age be moving apart? And could technology be contributing to that shift?

If what young people watch, wear and want tells us less about their age, while the traditional markers of adulthood arrive later, what does being a teenager mean now? And what might it mean in the future