The Tabloid Era: why we keep coming back to 2007

Every Aliens of Brooklyn design starts in the same place: a newsstand in about 2005, a magazine rack full of the same six faces, and a headline in a font the size of your hand. This is the era we keep coming back to, the reason the shop looks the way it does, and the thing our pieces are about. It is worth saying out loud what we see in it.

The years when celebrity became a product you could buy weekly

Between roughly 2003 and 2008, celebrity coverage stopped being a sideline and became an industry with its own supply chain. Us Weekly's "Stars, They're Just Like Us" turned grocery runs into content. TMZ launched in late 2005 and put a camera outside every restaurant in Los Angeles. Perez Hilton drew on the photos in marker and millions of people checked the site before work. The photographers were not freelancers with a hobby; they were crews on retainer, and a single frame of the right person on the wrong day paid more than most of their subjects' assistants earned in a year.

The subjects were young women, mostly: a pop star, an heiress, a child actor turned adult, a reality-show best friend. The coverage sold itself as affection and ran on humiliation. The reader bought the magazine to see someone having a worse week than they were. That transaction is the whole era in one sentence, and the era's own graphic language, the yellow exclusive stamps, the red circles, the prices on the cover, the flash on the windshield, told you exactly what you were buying.

The objects we still carry

The decade left physical artifacts that most of us still own or still want. The flip phone that closed with a snap and a sound. The velour tracksuit with a word across the back. The trucker hat that was ironic for exactly one summer. The low-rise jean, the tiny bag, the rhinestone everything, the digital camera with a wrist strap. Y2K style is not one look; it is the feeling of a time when the internet was new enough to be exciting and old enough to have a comment section.

We sell objects from that feeling. A dad hat with a word on it is a tabloid headline you chose for yourself. A tote with a face on it is the magazine cover you carried on the train. The shop's pink stripes, the lava lamp, the hats on the wall: it is a newsstand you can walk into, run by people who read the magazines and grew up to have opinions about them.

What changed, and what did not

Around 2021, the culture re-read the era. The documentaries about the pop star's conservatorship, the apologies from talk-show hosts, the Instagram posts from the people who had been the punchline: the consensus became that the coverage had been cruel and that everyone, readers included, had been part of it. That re-reading is honest and overdue. It is also, in its own way, another product. Nostalgia for the era and guilt about the era are now sold side by side, sometimes by the same magazines.

That double feeling is what our pieces try to hold. The image that made you laugh at someone in 2007 is the same image that makes you wince now, and it is still, undeniably, a great image. Collage lets us put the headline next to the price tag next to the flash next to the face and let you decide which one you are looking at. We are not selling the star. We are selling the newsstand, and the fact that you were standing at it.

One meme that proves the point

The most famous tabloid photo of the era, the heiress in a shirt that reads "Stop Being Poor," never happened. The real shirt said something else; the version everyone remembers was edited by a stranger and shared until it replaced the original. A fake photo became the truest artifact of the era, because it said what the era meant more clearly than any real one. That is the whole argument for making art out of this period instead of just reposting it: the editing was always the point.

How we work

Our pieces begin with public images from the era and turn them into something else: collage, cut-up, color, text, the tabloid's own furniture pointed back at itself. The aim is a new object with a point of view, not a reproduction. Some pieces land closer to that aim than others, and we are honest about which; the ones that are just a face on a shirt are the ones we are redrawing. The custom printing side of the shop runs on the opposite rule: we print the images you own, your photo, your drawing, your group chat, and we do not print logos, brand marks or artist merch designs. Your Y2K is yours to make.

If you want to see the sources

We do not reproduce the original tabloid photographs here, for the same reason we do not print other people's logos. The objects on this page are from Wikimedia Commons under licenses that allow it, credited under each one. If you want to look at the era in its own words, the public library's periodicals desk has the magazines, and the New York Public Library and the Museum of the City of New York hold newsstand and street photography from those years in their digital collections. Look at the covers from 2007 in order. The story tells itself.

Keep it weird, and keep the receipts.

Published October 2026 from 304 E 5th St, East Village, and 1630 E 6th St #104, East Austin.