Old Navy makes me feel old

I have a tendency to lament 'I'm so old!' a lot.  Mostly I'm being facetious, I know that I'm not actually old.  But I'm still shocked when I see evidence of how quickly time flies and how soon I transitioned from teenybopper awash in the trends as they took over, to the point where the 90s is considered...nostalgia.  Wow.

Particularly jarring are the latest slew of Old Navy ads.  First, it was a series themed around back to school that starred the 'kids' of Beverly Hills, 90210.  That show missed me by just a few years, the purview of say, my best friend's older sister.  And she's married with a kid now, so it makes sense that the store is looking to push her pop culture buttons to get her to make her clothing purchases there.

But now, now I see the Backstreet Boys providing the soundtrack to a parade of skinny jeans in a rainbow of colors:

Boy bands, now that was something I was right in the middle of.  BSB, 'N Sync (my personal favorite), LFO, 98 Degrees, and even Brits BBMAK, I was singing right along with them at every opportunity.  I even went to an 'N Sync concert, the Pop tour.  Back then, of course, no one would have been caught dead in these pants.

But now, here are a much older gang of Backstreet Men, as it were, putting their catchy chorus back into my head while reminding me that I have entered the second phase of my sellability as far as companies are concerned.  Now I am not the teenager with allowance to spend on CDs and magazines.  Now I am the young adult, possibly with a family and buying trends for them as much as for myself.

I know it's a little weird to be demarcating the stages of my life based on what I'm being sold and how, but it's a big part of the cultural context.  Plus, I can't help but get a little meta about myself.  It's the liberal arts student in me.