The Spice Girls live at Wembley Stadium this
year (Timmsy/Backgrid)Many boys who privately loved the Spice Girls have grown into men who openly love the Spice Girls – a
sizeable fan-base minority duly acknowledged in the Spice Girls’ new inter-song banter and merchandise –
but the crowd at the show looked to consist mostly of women in their late twenties and early thirties. Or,
rather, they were in their late twenties and early thirties and looked to be younger, dressed, as they were, in
the distinctive raiments of the Spice Girls. The spring air was temperate enough that jackets did not need to
intrude on ensembles of the truly committed, and so out of the stadium poured a stream of adult women in
pink miniskirts, leopard print crop tops and body-scale union jacks.
That exuberant mania of a 1997 childhood still propelled the tide of concertgoers, striding boisterously
through business district of North Dublin. At 11pm on that May evening, after the concert let out, they
floated by darkened alleyways, uncowed by the prospective dangers that, were they not travelling en masse,
would have forced them onto less direct, better-lit routes. There was not just safety but joie de vivre in
numbers. Marketing ploy or not, “girl power” had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
© New York Times