More from the '90s

Last month we published “30 Years,” a short blog post about the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of Infinite Body Piercing’s retail location. In it, I included images from our archives: scans of film prints from the early years of the studio. Among the many "Congratulations!" messages we received, we had quite a few comments on the portraits from back in the day—including a few “Hey, that’s me!” reposts. This inspired a bit more digging through the archives (actually, just a big box of film negatives and prints) to dig out more from “back in the day.”

These are scans of prints made from 35mm negatives. The images here are from early 1995 to the early 2000s, before digital photography became the norm and replaced film for all but specific uses.

These are pictures taken for our portfolios, to showcase the work we were doing at the studio, but they are also interesting for providing a snapshot of style at the time—including the changing fashions of piercing. These days piercing is everywhere, and seems like it has always been. It’s hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t, and when it didn’t look like it does now, with intricate ear projects and fancy gold options dominating jewelry choices.

Jewelry was overwhelmingly made of stainless steel, and the mantra at the studio (and most everywhere in the industry at the time), was “go big or go home.” Stretched ears still had the ability to shock, navel piercings were the most popular piercing in the mid-’90s, to be replaced by tongue piercings at the end of the decade. And we weren’t just piercers; we were body piercers.

Body piercing (the term used to differentiate what we did from standard ear piercings) had become a mainstream phenomenon just a few years earlier. (I’ve written before that, if anything marks that point in our culture it’s the release of the video for Aerosmith’s “Cryin’.”) It was an exciting time, where there wasn’t a template for what piercing was, how things were supposed to work, and how we were supposed to look. We felt like we were making things up as we went, every day.

These images show people passionately exploring something that was new and exciting in the popular culture, but they are also very much of their time, and very recognizably from the ‘90s. Everyone and everything was so much younger then.

If you find your picture in here and would rather not be included in our gallery, let us know. If not, drop me a line at james@infinitebody.com and let me know how you (and your piercings) are doing after all these years!