The representation of teenagers in pop culture From Breakfast Club to Euphoria, how the media has shaped our concept of youth

It was June 1945 - just a few weeks before the outbreak of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - when the New York Times triumphantly titled "teenagers are an American invention". To this day, the concept of teenager is so ingrained in our way of thinking that it seems strange to imagine that the term has not always existed or that it was even "invented", yet, adolescence as a category characterized by peculiar clothes, tastes, idols and ideals goes beyond the simple concept of "stage of life". From the Victorian era to the Tiktok generation, in each decade teenagers developed a way of dressing that reacted to social changes, until the advent of media and the fragmentation of post-modernism led to the frenetic succession of trends that now seems to be collapsing in on itself. But what exactly are young people? And how are they being represented?

If in 1957's Breakfast Club the stereotype of high school was portrayed as the realm of cliques and bullying, boxing the characters into "a nerd, a jock, a cheerleader or a criminal", Secret History of an American Teenager, Skins, Euphoria, brought to the attention of mainstream audiences the frailties of a difficult age we often forget we've lived through. If Skins was raw, emotional and disturbing at the same time in projecting every "teenage problem" onto its British cast, it still managed to tell often heartbreaking stories without trivializing them. A decade later, Euphoria pushes the same stereotypes to excess, almost inciting viewers to reproduce behaviors that are often distant from the reality that young people live. The Fraydaysforfuture generation thrifting in Sunday markets is light years away from the elite luxury and drama of Euphoria. Yet sex, drugs, mental illness, marginalization, conflicts with parental figures and insecurities related to a changing body have finally found their place in a society where paradoxically the young are getting older and the old are getting younger.