Your parents were cooler than you.
Exhibit A: Your dad pulling an Evel Knievel on his motorcycle in little more than short shorts. Exhibit B: Your mother on a cruise wearing pigtails and a bikini while stocking up at the buffet.
Twentysomethings who have come to realize their parents are human are scanning old, fuzzy photos and putting them out for mass consumption on blogs such as My Parents Were Awesome, My Mom, The Style Icon and Dads in Short Shorts. The sites showcase parents, grandparents and even great grandparents poolside, atop muscle cars and in exotic locales dressed in glamorous – and sometimes cringe-inducing – threads.
The blogs seem to delight in the moment when children come to grasp that their parents had style, adventures and lives before they came along.
Piper Weiss, a 31-year-old newspaper editor in New York, started her blog My Mom, The Style Icon in March. After years of rummaging through her mother's closet, Ms. Weiss stumbled across a photo album she'd never seen.
“She was in Egypt, Morocco and Italy and she's wearing these mod frocks that she had handmade by an Italian tailor, which she said was cheap then. I said, ‘Where did these pictures come from, where are these clothes now and who the hell are you?'”
Ms. Weiss scanned the photos, posted them online and asked her friends for theirs. She now has hundreds of submissions and a hypothesis: “Moms had more fun before we existed.”
The blog has a category for “hot wheels moms” (“80s mom with a Chevy in Baltimore”), and another called simply, “not your father.”
“I got all these pictures of moms with total stranger guys,” said Ms. Weiss, men she described as “random boyfriends or former admirers or guys that got in the picture because the mom's really pretty.”
Ms. Weiss's own mother, Marilyn, had plenty of rubber-neckers in the corners of her vacation photos.
“I realized we would totally hang out if we were the same age,” her daughter said.
Shown their yellowing photos online, many moms are moved, if not star struck. For some parents, the gesture can make them feel like “minor celebrities,” said Eliot Glazer, founder of My Parents Were Awesome.
“Before the fanny packs and Andrea Bocelli concerts, your parents (and grandparents) were once free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super awesome,” reads the site's blurb.
Mr. Glazer, a 26-year-old editor at humour website Urlesque.com, also started with his own family photos. Today, the site has 4,500 submissions and the wait time is three months.
'This was another dress she had handmade in Italy. It was cheaper to have things handmade back then and everything in Europe was a bargain. Is it me or does it seem like parents traveled a lot more in their 20's than I ever have. Also they didn't wear tevas and fleece. It's not exactly fair.' -momstyleicons.blogspot.com
Most of the photos come from the 1970s, but boomers are also submitting pictures of their parents from the 1950s. Mr. Glazer tries to oblige contributors' requests to post photos on specific dates, such as their parents' wedding anniversary or the anniversary of a parent's death.
He calls the site an antidote to the often mean-spirited nature of blog culture: “It's about people who want to pay tribute and honour and celebrate their parents and grandparents.”
