‘Skins’: The Show That Walked So ‘Saltburn’ Could Run

This article originally appeared on VICE Belgium.

Summer of 2010. I am 15 years old, and someone I kind of know invites me to a party while their parents are away. With blurry vision, I wander into their garden wearing ripped denim shorts, worn-out Converse, and a button-up layered on top of an Elevenparis t-shirt. A couple of people call me Effy because of my thick eyeliner look – or maybe because of my shaky, vodka-fuelled gait. 

That’s not a coincidence, of course. I was in my peak Skins era, where everything in my life – from my outfits to my parties – was inspired by the British TV series turning 17 on the 25th of January. The show’s iconic soundtrack, characters and plot lines left deep marks on me and on others in my generation who felt the urgency to live fast and experiment. I reached out to a few of them, and they agreed to talk about this era on condition of partial anonymity for privacy reasons.

To Antonin, 28, “the spirit of Skins lives in those parties you weren't really invited to, where everyone showed up with a bottle, and then it was open bar”.

Shagging in country fields, random people smashing things – Chris, Tony, Michelle, Cassie, and later Cook, Freddie, Emily taught us to guzzle booze, smash shit up, smoke joints – or shotgun them – and take as many pills as possible. The next day’s scratches and blackouts were clues to murky memories and stories to tell. 

When Antonin discovered the show at the end of middle school, the teen series genre had already been popular for decades. Skins came to freshen up the genre with stories of working and middle-class teens who had sex, did drugs and drank alcohol openly and in front of the camera.

Following a group of freedom-hungry teenagers, the show’s pop-trash aesthetic consisted of vomit, neon bras and an epic soundtrack mixing post-indie, electro-punk, and dubstep. It laid the groundwork for grittier, messier, darker portrayals of the teenage experience, from Project X to Euphoria and yes, even Saltburn.

Camille, who landed at her first Skins-themed parties 15 years ago, also envisioned herself as an Effy high on mushrooms dancing drunk in fields. “We listened to the same music, and she made me feel less inhibited,” she says.

Just like the parties in the series, Camille’s friends often spiralled into some dramatically OTT situation. “All it took was one person feeling down and starting to cry, and things would spiral in all directions,” she remembers. When things eventually settled, she and her friends would sit religiously in front of the TV to watch an episode, replenishing their imagination with even more drama.

For Charlotte, 30, the series provided inspiration for her dreams of emancipation. “My parents were overprotective, even a bit authoritarian, and prevented me from doing a lot of things,” she remembers. “The series allowed me to see something else, to push my parents’ limits, to be less reasonable.” 

It was this portrayal of freedom that also fascinated Antonin at the time. No longer a child but not yet an adult, Antonin found himself consciously flirting with boundaries. “When we partied, all we wanted was to have a blast, with the obvious juvenile clumsiness that came with it,” he says. “There was something glamorous about ending up on the ground vomiting on each other; paradoxically, I felt classy when I noticed myself staggering.” 

These excesses also overflowed into Antonin’s everyday life in middle school. “At 14, we would come to class in the morning and discreetly pull out a flask of vodka,” he laughs. “It was ridiculous because I would leave an hour later to puke, but we found some kind of elegance and audacity in this type of debauchery.” 

Around the age of 15, Lisa, who asked to be referred to with a pseudonym for privacy, went to her first Skins-inspired nights. “We purposely didn't eat much, drank a lot, made out with everyone,” she says. “Watching a series where people do drugs and sleep around reassured me when I was in a bad place.” 

After years of partying, Lisa now feels differently about her teenage years. “I sometimes feel nostalgic because we experienced crazy things, but when I think about it, there were slip-ups,” she points out. “Sex on drugs may seem cool, but you're not necessarily consenting, and you realise it too late.” Lisa, who started drinking and doing coke at a young age, has since quit drugs. “Sometimes, just for laughs, I say it was all a dissociative escape, that it wasn't really me,” she says. Sometimes, she felt she experienced reality almost like a fiction, with her in the leading role.

Charlotte also has some dark memories of those times. “I was dating a guy, and we spent a long time kissing on a couch,” she recalls. “The next day, I found a photo of us on Facebook where I was portrayed in a suggestive and sexualised pose. Monday morning at school, everyone was only talking about that.” 

In the post-MeToo era, a Skins rewatch quickly highlights some jarring issues with consent. In the first few seasons, Michelle is nicknamed “Nips” by her boyfriend because her breasts are uneven. Cassie is tasked with deflowering Sid, despite being in a vulnerable mental health state. Chris has a sexual and romantic relationship with a teacher almost twice his age.

Behind the screen, actors April Pearson and Laya Lewis – Michelle and Liv in the series – spoke out about the filming conditions on Are You Michelle From Skins?, a podcast created by Pearson. They said they didn’t feel adequately protected as (very) young actresses working on sex scenes, receiving negative comments about their bodies from the very first day of shooting. “And, as with a lot of victims of trauma, you look back at it and think: ‘Yeah, that was fucked up’,” Pearson said.

“Unlike the vast majority of teen productions, Skins decides to put at the heart of each episode …. sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll,” says teen movie researcher Célia Sauvage. “The series seems to finally embrace the excesses and pitfalls of adolescence, avoiding the politically correct life lessons usually part of American series.” 

While attractive, Skins characters are not idealised: They carry deep trauma on their sleeves, from Cassie’s eating disorder to Effy’s depression and Chris’s parental abandonment and overdose. “Skins has always explicitly acknowledged the toxicity of these behaviours,” argues Sauvage. “Those who succumb to them pay a high price: psychiatric hospitalisation, accidents and permanent disability, death, financial precariousness.” 

In real life, the teens who took inspiration from the show during those years of experimentation also came out of them with mixed feelings. While Lisa now describes herself as “anti-drugs”, Antonin still looks back at that time with fondness. “I'm not saying you have to go through that to enter adulthood, but it had some kind of an initiatory function,” he says.

Antonin still likes to party today, but things are obviously very different from what he did at 14. Let’s put it this way: The glamour of sobbing hysterically through tear-stricken makeup fades pretty quick when you’re in your late 20s.