Rich, Mean, and Still thirteen: What The Clique Got Right

It was circa 2006-2007. Teenage me, middle school, and the Canadian exchange program was all anyone talked about. I met the grades, I met the English requirement. But I wasn’t allowed to travel abroad on my own — a friend of mine was.

And when she came back, she brought home two gems in her luggage. Twilight, freshly released, nobody around us had heard of it yet and another new release, called The Clique.

Early adopter

Did I mention no one had heard of Twilight? That’s right! Only a small cohort of us, maybe three, were the first in our town to read it (prove me wrong). And then the wave came, caught up to us. I was insufferable in the specific way a twelve year old could be for being an early adopter.
The Clique never gave me that satisfaction. It was popular enough in Canada and the US. It even got a movie of its own a couple of years later. But at home the fan population was of exactly two.

As we all know, the first became a saga, the second became an extensive series. Both meant just one same thing. A clear purpose for my yearly trip to Barnes & Noble. It’s not that i could only buy books once a year. The trip was actually not particularly to Barnes & Noble, but to visit family in the US. And I’ve been loyal to my B&N visit since before i could explain why. The Twilight Saga books I could find home were only available in Spanish. So I bought my original version on said trip. And as for The Clique, it was inexistent at home.

Let me continue with the parallels. During the following years I could walk past by any girl and have a full on conversation about the global phenomenon. The Clique on the other hand became part of my inner world. All I can say is the cashier at the B&N, well… Little did she know what she was handing little old me. It was a copy of a version of my adolescence i craved and would never quite experience.

the plot

The plot as it reads from the title involves a select group of popular Rich girls. Obviously cruel to the main character. Claire Lyons had to be your average goody two shoes, who didn’t come from the same kind of money. It is very “mean girls” goes to a rich private middle school. Lessons are learned in each book, and you can see character development. What actually held me was that these girls were still children. Mean, brand-obsessed, occasionally vicious about it. And none of that is being held up as good, the bullying in these books is bullying, full stop. But not in any hurry to be older than they were. Not Gossip Girl kids borrowing a twenty-five-year-old’s life for a high school hallway.

My take on the clique

What this series actually gave my young teenage self was a reflection of my expectations for that specific life period. I saw it as proof. It confirmed something that i had quietly been carrying in my inner world. But i didn’t know how to put it in words yet. That the local version of growing up was wrong somehow. That cool didn’t have to mean rehearsing thirty at thirteen.

It was oh so different of what I actually had at school. It wasn’t organized around a nice room, sharp clothes, a confidence you could be a little cutting with. All of which, on the page, looked so reachable. It was organized around acting “grown up”. I wasn’t there for any of it. Not because I was kept out. Because I was, factually, still a child, and had no interest in pretending otherwise. I wanted the kind of cool that let you stay thirteen a little longer. I was still in my limited too bikini era, not quite victoria secret’s bikinis yet. Everyone around me wanted Gossip Girl (even though it was’t out yet). The kind of life that got rid of thirteen as fast as it could be gotten rid of.

The Fashion

This angle in the books, got me so invested! Fashion was deffinetely my type of cool at the time, not that i was rocking high end fashion couture by any means, but i was a huge fan of Vogue, teen vogue, cosmopolitan, and also national magazines such as Tú. And i tried my very best to pull out inspo from them, and create my own outfits from out of the rack clothes. So, when I learned these rich cool girls, considered Abercrombie & Fitch beneath them it was super fun and interesting for me to read. The Clique shopped there strictly for the bags with the shirtless boys printed on them, treating the purchase itself like a minor humiliation. Meanwhile I had built an entire yearly pilgrimage around that store on every U.S. trip, genuinely certain I was fashion forward. I was not, it turns out, dressed in Ferragamo. Instead I was dressed in apparel worth a shopping bag, and no extra cents apparently.

Journaling in the Series

There’s a smaller subplot in the books that was right up my alley. Massie Block, the main mean girl, which was oh so aspirational to young me. Not for being mean but for being cool in the sense that her lifestyle seemed so glamourous and fun.

She practiced slow living when it was not yet a thing. It makes sense that the term hadn’t spread at the time since smartphones weren’t the norm yet. I remember i had a Sony Ericsson and the new iPod touch at the time.

Anyway, what I was getting at is the following. Massie practiced a type of journaling, that for years I kept trying and failing to sustain. I’m talking about “The Current State of Union” journal entries. It consisted of an updated list of what was in, what was out, in her teenage life.

I consider this writing device one of the best. Also the most creative device the author integrated beautifully in the book series. Even if I could never make it last more than a few entries. Compressing an entire life into a weekly ledger of taste is harder than Massie Block made it look.

The Movie

The movie arrived a few years after the first book. Quiet enough that I only knew about it because I was already part of the fan base.

And years after that, when I was in university. I found the DVD sitting in a discount bin at a supermarket, next to whatever else nobody wanted anymore. I bought it purely because the coincidence felt too specific not to.

This find felt epic, yet again I really didn’t have who to share the feeling with. By that time, the friend who first introduced me to the series and I had grown apart. So really only my inner world understood the hype.

Something very similar happened to me with another book turned movie. If you’d like to find out about it read about it here.

The cast

Casting was a USA nationwide open call in the summer of 2007 . No agents, no connections, just random girls sending in their own audition tapes and somehow landing the entire Pretty Committee.

A couple of them absolutely made it afterward:

Bridgit Mendler (Kristen Gregory) went on to headline her own Disney Channel show.

And Dylan Minnette, who played Claire’s annoying little brother, ended up as the lead of 13 Reasons Why. Todd Lyons walked so a teenage drama could run, apparently.

the tea

I went down a rabbit hole researching for this post, and buckle up, because there’s actually a lot here.

First: that whole sun-drenched, poolside, permanent-summer aesthetic of the movie? Filmed in Rhode Island in February and March of 2008. Dead winter. The cast was freezing between every single one of those scenes. Smiling through it like the professionals they were being paid nothing to be. Or maybe they were being overpaid, who knows.

Here’s the one that actually delighted me. The costume designer, Mandi Line, went on to dress the entire cast of Pretty Little Liars. Iconic resume. Fashion was already my favorite part of the book series, and te movie didn’t disappoint. Finding out the wardrobe team had that pedigree felt like getting confirmation I wasn’t wrong to obsess over it.

Now, the actual biggest twist: Tyra Banks bought the rights to this and produced it herself. Tyra. Banks. She’s said she saw herself in both Claire and Massie growing up — the outsider and the queen bee, somehow both. And it was her personal decision to skip theaters entirely and go straight to DVD. Because she was convinced of one thing. Tween girls would rather watch it curled up at a sleepover than sit through one theatrical release. Which, was an incredible foresight. Who would have thought she’d be cancelled more than 15 years later.

Some really exciting news, at least for ,me, is that hopefully the series isn’t over. Lisi Harrison and Ellen Marlow, who played Claire, are actually co-writing a real sequel right now. Catching the Pretty Committee up in their late twenties, careers and weddings and all. They’re documenting the whole process on a Substack called State of the Reunion. Still no release date…but you can take a sneak peek of the new chapters here.

Lone Alley

Trends are supposed to travel. You go early, marketing has a word for it “early adoptors”. The wave reaches everyone eventually “laggards”, and you get to be right together. Twilight worked that way. The Clique didn’t. I got the early part. I never got the company, I don’t see marketing giving this phenomenon a name. Id call it something along the lines of “lone alley”.

Luckily the world is bigger than my hometown. And we are much more connected now than when I was thirteen. So hopefully this post reaches other 2000’s teens fans of The Clique. And now, we can finally have a place to reminisce and rant about it. I’m eager to read you in the comments. Also perhaps i get to inspire someone to read “The Clique”book series now, I’d love to know.

If you want to know more about The Clique, or already read it and wish to keep the conversation going, you can check out my book review.

With love, Celeste