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If you were a television obsessed tween in the early aughts, odds are, a still from the 2001 Cartoon Network hit show Totally Spies will drown you in nostalgia. To jog your memory on the plot, the series followed three teenagers from Los Angeles—Alex, Sam, and Clover—as they navigated typical high school trials and tribulations by day (Boys! School! An evil brat named Mandy!) and saved the world from vengeful criminals by night. They could do it all: they wore platform boots and daisy-embroidered miniskirts and kicked ass with the help of their high tech gadgets, which were all adorably shaped like Polly Pockets. I desperately wanted to be like them.
But whether or not Totally Spies was your after-school show of choice—maybe you preferred Courage The Cowardly Dog, a series that quite frankly walked so A24 horror could run—there’s no arguing that on a visual level, there’s something about the Totally Spies aesthetic that pulls on our millennium-baby heartstrings. The hyper Y2K, retro futuristic style and vibrant color scheme of the clothing and interiors encapsulates both our younger selves’ dream lifestyle and present selves’ TikTok feed. Despite the show being nearly 20 years old, it feels equal parts Tigerbeat Magazine and Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour. In other words, the style in Totally Spies doesn’t just reflect what we used to find cool, it helped define what we love today.
As it turns out, I’m not the only one with an affinity for the show’s aesthetic. Velvet Coke, a beloved Instagram account that posts pop culture throwbacks, shared a slideshow of Totally Spies’ interior designs, last summer, that racked up nearly 116,000 likes. According to the account’s admin, whom her followers have charmingly nicknamed Velvey, she was originally drawn to Totally Spies due to its honoring of individuality. “All of the main characters had different looks, personalities and hobbies, and it was presented as something desirable,” she explains in an email.
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When it came to the interiors, Velvey felt that the aesthetic’s celebration of maximalism and eccentricity echoed these sentiments of self-expression—every room had a special “personal touch” to it and every detail—from the vintage IKEA-esque moon and star wall decor, to the enormous, over-the-top Austin Powers style floor to ceiling lava lamps—made the space feel not just playful but distinctive and lived in.
In the early days of creating the show’s aesthetic, Totally Spies art director Stephane Berry envisioned dreamy, Space Age pop fantasies— Barbarella, Space Crash, Star Trek, and Charlie’s Angels were among some of the more detectable visuals on their initial mood board. But as a born and bred Parisian, Stephane shares that he also found himself inspired by the “ultracool” aesthetic of French thrillers and comedies of the ’70s like Oscar, The Magnifique, and Body of My Enemy. What resulted was a blend of ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s design, which was then modernized for younger audiences with the vibrant, hot pinks and lime greens popular in teen style at the time.
As far as why now, nearly 20 years later, audiences of all ages continue to resonate with the aesthetic of Totally Spies, Stephane suspects it’s largely due to the wide range of styles referenced. “It’s fun and very rewarding at the same time [that people connect with the interiors],” he says. “I think it’s because the ‘Totally Spies’ interior designs subconsciously embody decades of creative revolutions and freedom of tone.”
The last episode of Totally Spies aired in June of 2013, leaving behind six seasons worth of episodes to circulate interior design Pinterest boards and live rent free in my brain, informing all of my Esty home purchases, until my dying day. But I have good news to part with—Stephane and his team are currently working on a brand new season of Totally Spies, which will air sometime in 2023, and will be sure to bring all of our Y2K fantasies back to our screens.
