A “Romy and Michele” sequel, a “Clueless” series, and Olivia Rodrigo reinventing Lilith Fair. Gen X spent decades between two louder cohorts, and the work it made without an audience is what everyone seems to want now.
“We don’t have to use the cardboard cutout anymore because he’s here,” Molly Ringwald said on April 12, 2025, at a convention center in Chicago, where the five leads of John Hughes’ seminal 1985 film “The Breakfast Club” sat on a stage together for the first time since the film was released. The cutout had been standing in for Emilio Estevez, who had declined every previous invitation and had now, at last, said yes. “I skipped all of my high school reunions,” he told the moderator, Josh Horowitz. “This was just something that I felt I needed to do for myself.” Ringwald said she felt “really very emotional and moved” to have the stars all together. Estevez said that the 40th anniversary, in the city where they had made the picture, was finally enough. “It just felt like it was time.”
The place where they made it is about 20 miles northwest of that stage, in Des Plaines, Illinois, and it was already a ruin when they got there. Maine North High School had closed in 1981 for low enrollment and sat empty until the spring of 1984, when a film crew reopened it for a few weeks. The school’s actual library was too small to shoot in, so the production built the library, the one everybody remembers, the one with the mezzanine and the strange sculpture standing in the middle of it, inside the defunct gymnasium. The building belongs to the Illinois State Police now. The gym where the library stood is a warehouse where the state keeps confiscated and lost property.
That is a fairly precise description of what happened to Generation X: the room was a set, built in a condemned building, by people who were told the enrollment was too low to bother with.
Why John Hughes movies still define Gen X
Hughes made “The Breakfast Club” in the middle of a run that has no real equivalent in American movies: “Sixteen Candles” in 1984, and “Weird Science” in 1985, “Pretty in Pink” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” in 1986, “Some Kind of Wonderful” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” in 1987, “Uncle Buck” in 1989, and the “Home Alone” script in 1990. He set much of it in a town he invented called Shermer, Illinois, and he shot it in the actual suburbs north of Chicago, in split-levels and strip malls and parking lots, which is where the audience for it also lived. He died in 2009 but his catalog remains the backbone of Gen X in the literal sense that it is the structure everything else hangs on. Hughes made movies about what teenagers thought, at a moment when movies about teenagers were mostly about what teenagers did, and he made them without an adult in the room to explain the moral at the end. We either figured it out for ourselves, or we didn’t and that, it seems, was entirely the point.
He also understood the demographics better than anyone has since. “My generation had to be taken seriously because we were stopping things and burning things,” Hughes told Ringwald in a 1986 interview for Seventeen, quoted in her 2018 New Yorker essay. “We were able to initiate change, because we had such vast numbers. We were part of the Baby Boom, and when we moved, everything moved with us. But now, there are fewer teens, and they aren’t taken as seriously as we were. You make a teen-age movie, and critics say, ‘How dare you?’ There’s just a general lack of respect for young people now.”
What the generation did with the shortfall of respect was build a parallel infrastructure and then decline to advertise it. There were indie zines photocopied after hours at somebody’s father’s office and mailed in hand-addressed envelopes to strangers in other states. There were college radio stations playing records that would not be on any chart for a decade — if ever. There were record stores whose entire business model was a clerk with opinions, and seven-inch singles pressed in runs small enough that the band delivered them to the shop personally. None of it scaled, and none of it was meant to. There was, after all, no TikTok to make it go viral. The measure of a thing was whether or not it was any good. The audience was assumed to be small, and the smallness was understood as a form of protection, on the theory that a small audience cannot be pandered to profitably.
Growing up smaller than the cohort in front of you produces a specific set of habits. You let yourself into an empty house after school and you learn, without anyone saying it, that the adults are not coming back for a good while — and when they do, they’re too tired to pay you much notice (see: “It’s 10pm, do you know where your children are?”). You conclude that no institution is going to arrive on your behalf, which is less bitter than it sounds and mostly just organizes your planning. You develop irony as a load-bearing wall, because sincerity can be used against you and irony cannot. And you decide, with a seriousness that looks comic in retrospect and did not feel comic at the time, that the worst available sin is selling out. I still hold opinions about those movies and the music that formed me as a teenager and have never meaningfully revised. The briefs that crossed my desk over the years named millennials, then Gen Z, then millennials again with Gen Z — and now Gen Alpha — as the aspiration, and I cannot remember a single one that mentioned Gen X. And for a long time it did not occur to me to find that strange, because being unaddressed was simply the condition of being Gen X: we were invisible, unimportant, and we liked it that way.
Ringwald, for her part, has done the harder work of loving the thing and arguing with it. Watching “The Breakfast Club” with her daughter in 2018, she wrote about the scene in which John Bender hides beneath the table where her character is sitting and, off-camera, touches her. “It’s hard for me to understand how [Hughes] was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it?” She landed on the teachers who still show the films in classrooms, “because good teachers want their students to know that what they feel and say is important; that if they talk, adults and peers will listen.” That, she wrote, is “ultimately the greatest value of the films, and why I hope they will endure.”
They have endured, and now they are being renovated. A “Romy and Michele” sequel with Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino went into production last June and is dated for a 2027 release on Hulu. In July, Paramount+ ordered a “Clueless” sequel series with Alicia Silverstone back as Cher Horowitz, 31 years on, now the mother of a teenage girl, with Amy Heckerling among the executive producers. Heckerling had already made “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” before she made “Clueless,” which means one director is responsible for two of the four or five documents this generation actually recognizes itself in. “‘Clueless’ is coming home,” Jane Wiseman, the head of originals at Paramount+, said when the series was announced, calling the original “a box office hit and instant pop culture classic.”
Whether any of it will be good is a separate question, and the honest answer is that the reboot machine has a poor record with material it does not respect. What is not in question is the appetite. “In a time of turmoil, you cling to something nostalgic and familiar, so it’s like comfort food,” Jamie Lee Curtis told TheWrap while promoting 2025’s “Freakier Friday” (a sequel to 2003’s adaptation of the 1976 film starring Jodie Foster). “You leave uplifted and you feel — because you’re in a theater with other people, not on a streamer — you’re not alone.”
Lilith Fair’s sort-of return and the Gen X music revival
“It needs a reinvention of sorts,” Sarah McLachlan told Pollstar last October when she was asked once again whether the all-female Lilith Fair she created in 1997 could come back. It should, she concluded, and it should “be championed by a young artist, someone of today, like an Olivia Rodrigo.” She was candid about her own reserves. “I’m 57. I’m tired,” she said, describing the original as “all-encompassing.” She was equally candid about the need. “Do we need more women supporting women? Do we need the general idea of ‘we all need each other, and we should be lifting each other up instead of tearing each other down?’ Yeah, we need more of that.”
Eight months later, Rodrigo announced Daisy Chain Fields, a one-day, all-women festival at Great Park in Irvine, California, built around two stages and no overlapping sets, so that nobody has to choose. “Lilith Fair was a huge inspiration in me starting this festival,” she told Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America.” “The first person that I called when I decided that I wanted to do this festival was Sarah McLachlan.” Chappell Roan, Doechii, Mitski, Bikini Kill, Garbage, and The Breeders are on the bill for the end of this month, with Stevie Nicks, Karen O, and McLachlan appearing as guests, and every performer is going on for free, with the proceeds going to organizations that work with women and girls. It sold out in half an hour.
What Rodrigo has said about the archive is more revealing than anything she has said about the music. Describing in the Lilith Fair documentary what it was like to learn that a touring festival of women had grossed millions of dollars, filled amphitheaters for three summers, and been treated as a punchline for most of the years since, she said, “I was in disbelief that I’d never heard of it before.” A generation’s central achievement had gone missing between its occurrence and her lifetime — par for the Gen X course of things.
The rest of it has come back in the same register: The Smashing Pumpkins are playing “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” in full across 27 arenas this fall, 30 years on, with Billy Corgan describing a show he had wanted to stage “for over a decade” and would only do “on the terms I’d set.” Corgan, James Iha, and Jimmy Chamberlin also went back into a room with Butch Vig, who produced “Gish” and “Siamese Dream” and had not worked with them since. “This particular young generation coming in is really looking for authenticity,” Corgan said on Chicago radio in March. “We are the last of our kind,” Shirley Manson of Vig’s Garbage told Louder in June. “We are not a young band where everybody is super-excited about us.”
Corgan’s remark describes his audience’s children arriving, by a completely different route, at the position his audience held at 17. Authenticity was the Gen X currency. It was policed with an intensity that had no relationship to the stakes because a generation that had been told there were not enough of it to matter compensated by deciding that the only measure worth keeping was whether a thing was real. Popularity was available as evidence against you (see: Nirvana). That is a strange doctrine to build a youth on and a surprisingly good one to leave behind, and it is the doctrine a 20-year-old in 2026 is reaching for when she says she wants something authentic.
Gen X’s spending power isn’t invisible
The commercial recognition arrived on a lag, as it usually does, and it arrived with numbers attached. ICSC’s study of $5 trillion in retail spending across 426 retailers found Gen X responsible for 31 percent of what Americans spend in stores and online while making up 19 percent of the population, with the highest revenue per shopper in nearly every category. “Gen X is the powerhouse driving today’s retail economy, spending more per shopper than all other generations,” Tom McGee, the organization’s president and chief executive, said. NIQ and World Data Lab, working the same question globally, put the cohort’s annual spending at $15.2 trillion and titled the finding “overlooked and under-marketed.” Gen Xers are the gatekeepers of trillions in spending, “effectively serving as the CFOs of three generations — their own, their children’s, and their parents’,” Wolfgang Fengler, the chief executive of World Data Lab, said.
Fashion is already there: Chloë Sevigny walked the Miu Miu fall show in March, 30 years after her first one, alongside Gillian Anderson and Kristen McMenamy, in clothes that Rachel Tashjian described for CNN as an argument for restraint. “It was the idea that a little is enough,” Miuccia Prada told her. “If you are not adorned, you are enough.” In downtown Los Angeles this year, the ASU FIDM Museum hung Calvin Klein, Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Anna Sui, and Gianni Versace in cases under the title “Obsessed: Fashion and Nostalgia in the ’90s.” “In times of great change, people are more interested in nostalgia and this collective nostalgia and this bigger understanding of a time that isn’t necessarily factual,” Christina Frank, who curated it, told Fashionista. “But it’s showing this shift in culture — hopefully, eventually to something better.”
What is being sold back to Gen X now as we reach our 50s and 60s is a posture. Hughes was correct that there were fewer of us and that we would not be taken seriously, and he was wrong about what would follow from it. The work got made anyway. Four decades later it is the thing a 23-year-old goes looking for when she wants to know how to build a festival, and the thing a museum puts under glass, and the thing a studio pays to reopen. Generation X has spent its entire adult life demonstrating that a cohort can be overlooked and correct at the same time, and that the correctness keeps until somebody needs it. Ringwald’s teachers were right about the films for the same reason Rodrigo was right about the festival. What holds up is the work made by people who took the smaller, unwatched room seriously enough to build something permanent inside it.
“I always felt in a weird way that the work was half done,” Judd Nelson said on that stage in Chicago, sitting with the four people he made a movie with when they were all still young enough to be cast as high school students, “that at some point we would all get back together.”
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