I spent a lot of my childhood trying to figure out which Spice Girl I was, usually landing somewhere between Scary's self-assurance, Sporty's athleticism and Ginger's femininity; this was less immediately pronounced than Victoria Beckham's or Emma Bunton's, yet unmistakably there. I still think about it because growing up doesn't mean you stop thinking about the things that formed you. I still settle for a hybrid, as if the five Spice Girls represented the entire spectrum of female possibility and my job was to locate myself somewhere along it.
I suspect this entire exercise would sound mildly deranged to a 10-year-old today, and likely offensive to certain guardians of contemporary identity politics. Why should anyone have to choose a single identity? Why should a personality fit into one of five predetermined categories?
And why, exactly, was the only Black woman called Scary? These are questions I find myself asking as the Spice Girls prepare to release a 30th-anniversary collection. I will, naturally, be buying it.
I have also been personally petitioning the Spice Girls through endless Instagram messages and comments, presumably disappearing into the great digital void, for a reunion at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Ladies, the world will travel. Spice Girls gods, please hear this desperate fan.
But the anniversary raises a more interesting question than whether five middle-aged women can still perform the choreography to "Stop." The group that sold more than 100 million records worldwide built an empire on a formula that now looks out of date: five women, five exaggerated stereotypes, all somehow coalescing into one glorious, uncomplicated proposition about female empowerment. Their genius was making identity something you could play with. Our generation, rather unfortunately I should add, has made identity something you must defend.
Consider the glorious absurdity of the women themselves. Geri Halliwell could arrive at the 1997 Brit Awards wearing a Union Jack tea towel masquerading as a minidress while Beckham stood beside her looking as if she'd wandered into the wrong party and was too impeccably dressed to leave. Melanie Chisholm wore tracksuits and sneakers on the same stage as Bunton, almost always in pigtails and sometimes talking like a toddler.
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