We Asked Emos at When We Were Young to Recreate Their Myspace Profile Pics

The first-ever 'selfie' was taken in 1839 by amateur chemist and photography enthusiast Robert Cornelius, who set up a camera in the back of his family's chandelier store in Philadelphia. However, some historians (us, we’re historians) would argue that the first true selfie – in the form we currently understand it – emerged on the social media platform Myspace somewhere around the year 2003.

When the word “Myspace” is invoked, like the ghost of comment sections’ past, most people think of a particular image: a bobble-headed teenage selfie, taken from the top down, over-saturated to the point where the only features you can really see are a pair of charcoal-rimmed eyes and a pierced lip.

Beneath the head, there is typically an outfit that features at least two of the following items: a vest from H&M that is designed to show as much bra and/or enormous chest script tattoo as possible, jeans that make your legs look like a couple of pipe cleaners, and Converse customised with biro. This image, locked in a time capsule alongside the word “roflcopter” and a copy of The Blackout’s debut album, is inextricably bound up with the dawn of social media and the subculture that rose to prominence along with it. I’m talking, of course, about emo. Specifically, the brand of emo that prompted 16-year-olds to give themselves a combover and go through five sticks of Collection liquid eyeliner per week.

While the particular selfie has fallen somewhat out of style, this iteration of emo has endured for two decades. It lives on in the fashion of emo rappers like Lil Uzi Vert and, most recently, Machine Gun Kelly. It has been rediscovered and reappropriated by Gen Z on TikTok, and it is very much on display everywhere from the line-up to the branding of the Las Vegas alt music festival When We Were Young. 

To see if they’ve still got the chops to duck-face and peace-sign their way to micro-fame, VICE photographer Christopher Bethell handed his camera over to the Hot Topic warriors to see who could produce the finest Myspace Mona Lisa.

Here are some of the results:

@emmaggarland / @christopherbethell