1995: Nicky Briger was a sub-editor on the first issue of marie claire, made her way to editor-in-chief for eight years, and is still with the brand as general manager. Suffice to say, she’s seen it all. Here, she shares it was really like to be aged 30 in the year of landlines, launch parties and low-cost housing.
Early 1995, and I was on the cusp of 30, full of nerves disguised as confidence and stuffed into a pair of painfully tight Morrissey Edmiston pants that cost a week’s rent. With my curls scraped back into a scrunchie, I stepped into a vast, echoey Sydney office for a job interview at a magazine no-one had ever heard of.
It was called marie claire. There were only two people on staff: Jackie Frank, the founding editor, and her deputy. No HR rep. No cultural fit questionnaire. No “values alignment” PowerPoint. Jackie looked me up and down, asked a few questions, and hired me on the spot.
A modern hiring manager might call it “reckless”; I called it a dream interview. Truthfully, she could’ve offered me a gig cleaning toilets and I’d have said yes. I’d been a major fan of the British edition’s unique mix of high-gloss fashion and fearless, female-first journalism. I wanted in, whatever the role. It was the boom after the bust. Australia had clawed its way out of a brutal early ’90s recession and was ready to party.
Paul Keating was PM, dropping acid one-liners and economic reform like confetti. Inflation was down, optimism was up, and Clueless was the number one film, teaching us that Alaïa was “like, a totally important designer” and that matchmaking your teachers was a legitimate act of public service.
Bill Clinton was in the White House, saxophone in hand, spreading hope and centrist Southern charm across the globe – pre-Monica, pre-impeachment, pre-Y2K paranoia. Supermodels weren’t just on the runway – they were the culture: Christy, Cindy, Linda and Naomi were on every magazine cover (ours included). And the phrase “dot com” had just entered the chat, along with Windows 95 and its revolutionary little Start button.
But in mag land, we were still largely tech-lame – pagers, faxes and clunky cream-coloured computers that sounded like a 747 taking off were the AI of our day. Google hadn’t been invented, mobile phones were the size of bricks, and print reigned supreme.
The digital future wasn’t even a whisper – and frankly, we were too busy to notice. Working in mags back then was less “lean in” and more “pass out at your desk”. You wore your work ethic like a badge of honour.
A 14-hour day was standard, and if Jackie saw you leaving the office before 8pm, she’d raise an eyebrow and ask, “Half day?” Her glass-walled office loomed over us like a watchtower, and we perfected the art of combat crawling across the carpet at night trying to escape unseen.
The irony is, we were just making one magazine. One. These days we create socials, shoots, video, newsletters, websites, podcasts, campaigns – and maybe, maybe – find time to eat a lunch that isn’t a Muscle Chef. Back then, the technology didn’t just slow you down, it defined the pace.
If we wanted to commission a story on, say, a secret female militia in the Iranian desert, we’d have to fax the brief to a freelance journo (who may or may not be in a tent with electricity), and when the story was filed, wait hours for grainy pages to trickle back, then sift through metres of paper and rolls of film. Email? Didn’t exist. Dropbox? Stop it.
Everything was manual, painstaking and incredibly slow – and yet we still met our deadlines. Eventually. Outside of work, life was a Rolodex of bars, pubs, clubs and parties. We went out because we could afford to.
“Pre-loading” didn’t exist because cocktails were $4. Seinfeld ruled the airwaves, and we thought hanging out, talking about nothing, was the plot. There were no smartphones or DMs; if you wanted to find someone, you called their landline or dropped in unannounced.
If you wanted to date someone, you met them on the dance floor – and maybe hooked up based on a vague vibe and the smell of CK One. You didn’t swipe, you winged it. In late 1995, I bought my first house – a sliver of a terrace in Sydney’s inner west – for the jaw-dropping sum of $150,000. Not a typo.
The concept of owning real estate wasn’t a miracle or a meme, it was the next, logical step, especially by the time you hit 30. We never had much money, but we managed to acquire assets and live large – the cost of living simply wasn’t a thing. As for motherhood – well, that was a minefield.
The average age to have a baby was 26, and while I was among those bucking the trend I watched colleagues juggle newborns, deadlines and breast pumps like circus performers. Maternity leave was less a policy, more a polite suggestion, and flexibility was unheard of.
One journo literally kept her baby in a bassinet under her desk and breastfed in the stairwell between edits. Even when I had my first child years later, I got the polite but firm call from my male boss saying it was “probably time” to come back – three months postpartum. But the job mattered. Deeply.
One of the first stories I oversaw was called “Jailed for Being Raped”, a devastating exposé of Pakistani women imprisoned after reporting exual assault, charged with the offence of “sex out of wedlock”.
The injustice hit us all in the gut and set the tone for future storytelling. marie claire wasn’t fluff and lipstick – it was fashion and fury. We covered politics, violence, misogyny and power through a distinctly female lens, long before it was fashionable to call that “feminism”. And we had plenty to push back against. Despite the Spice Girls blasting “girl power”, the mid-’90s were woeful for women.
The media objectified us in every second headline, lads’ mags were booming, and female celebs were gleefully torn down. But we were hellbent on doing better. Loud, glossy, determined.
And if one moment sums up the sheer audacity of marie claire – and 1995 – it was our $1 million launch party. Held at a Sydney Harbour mansion, 500 guests heaved on a floating dance floor, fireworks cracked over the Bridge, and a giant glowing “marie claire” sign lit up the water.
At one point, a waiter’s hair caught fire after a tray of flaming sambucas went rogue. My then-boyfriend (now husband) threw his jacket over the guy’s head and rolled him on the floor to smother the flames. The party rolled on. Excess was the vibe; minimalism was for slip dresses only.
So, yes, 1995 wasn’t perfect. There were flaws in the way we worked, lived, dated and treated women. But it was also a time of possibility – when you could walk into a room, fake confidence and emerge with a dream job. And although we’ve swapped faxes for Teams and monthly deadline panic for 24/7 digital hustle, the mission is still the same: tell stories that matter, make women feel seen, and throw a damn good party while we’re at it.
Turning 30 In 2025
2025: Harriet Sim wasn’t even born when marie claire Australia launched in 1995. She’s nostalgic for the “golden era” of a decade she barely remembers, but wouldn’t give up being 30 in 2025 for anything. Even if it means never owning a house.
It’s a brisk Sunday morning as three girlfriends and I meet for brunch. We take turns rattling off our orders, and no-one asks for avocado toast; we’re all trying to save money.
We’re all almost 30, which means we now bear the financial responsibility of proper adulthood. One friend is expecting her first baby. The other has just pulled off a near-impossible task for a single woman in Sydney: securing a rung on the property ladder. And the third is about to take on the crippling debt of a four-week trip to France.
As for me, well, what do you do as a near 30-year-old with no kids, no prospect of buying a house, and an Instagram feed flooded with Euro summer pics? You plan a wedding in Italy. Before you roll your eyes and scoff that this is why millennials can’t afford houses, I’ll have you know that the price of a wedding in Australia is so exorbitant (at least $50,000) that a Tuscan villa is the fiscally savvy choice.
If the ’90s were about excess, 2025 is about escapism: escaping from the pressures of everyday life in any way we can, by going overseas or spending on small luxuries like coffee and Pilates to stave off the cost-of-living doom.
The fact is, it’s expensive to be a 30-year-old today, when a mortgage is eight times your salary (in 1995, it was three times), you pay double the tax that a baby boomer would have paid at your age, and inflation is growing faster than your salary is increasing. Fortunately, economists predict we’ll be the greatest inheritors of generational wealth. But if relying on my parents to cark it is my best chance at financial security, I’ll rent.
If you want to find a 30-year-old on a Friday night, your best bet is to turn up at their house. I know this because I have several of my friends’ locations pinned on Find My Friends. Nights in usually involve rewatching your favourite retro comfort series – think Girls, Sex and the City or Gilmore Girls – between new seasons of Emily in Paris and The White Lotus.
As for Saturday mornings, they’re no longer reserved for hangovers but for morning walks and gossiping with friends. Sure, there are the occasional boozy nights too, but when cocktails cost $25, it’s often a hard sell to your mates juggling babies and enormous mortgages.
The ripple effect of the wellness culture also means that prospective dates are no longer on the dance floor but at your run club – although I expect trying to chat to your crush while legging it from Bronte to Bondi is just as challenging (and sweaty) as it was to shout over a Whitney Houston banger in a ’90s club.
Don’t get me wrong, the apps are still alive and well. One friend is determined to get into the property market by finding a landlord on Raya. In the workplace, it might appear as though 30-year-old women have it good.
The #metoo movement caused a global reckoning of sexual assault in the workplace (and beyond), meaning we can get on with the job without fearing for our safety.
The pay gap still exists, yet your male colleague disclosing that he earns more than you is no longer a fireable offence, meaning more women can push for what they’re worth. For those considering starting a family, the days of choosing between a career and having children are gone, because no-one can afford to be a stay-at-home parent.
Two-income households are no longer progressive – they’re a means of survival. I’m also well aware I’m one of the lucky few who genuinely love their job.
My first marie claire story was a feature exposing the physical and sexual abuse of children in the troubled-teen industry. I spent weeks trying to track down an Australian woman who would speak to me on the record.
Eventually, I found my case study, wrote up the story and watched it hit newsstands. A few weeks later, I received an email from that same case study thanking me for the story and telling me that my article had put pressure on the police to finally conduct a thorough investigation into the school that had abused her. It later shut down. That’s the power of marie claire, which has lasted three decades: real change.
The funny thing about being 30 is that almost no-one is on the same page as you. Half your friends are hustling to get ahead: freezing their eggs, creating budget spreadsheets, working second jobs at night, and buying ETFs.
The other half are simply looking for an escape. The notion that if you work hard, you will one day have it all – career, marriage, kids, house – no longer exists, and frankly that’s liberating. But it’s also incredibly scary. What if ChatGPT takes my job? What if I can’t have children?
For now, I push that fear aside and retreat into an old episode of Sex and the City. The scene opens with four women at brunch sharing their frustrations about work, life and love. I breathe a sigh of relief. Perhaps women in their thirties have always felt uncertain about the future.
Yes, the ’90s might have had fabulous parties, cheap cocktails and great clothes. But what we have is opportunities: to pivot careers, stall timelines, take sidesteps and big leaps backwards without the fear of straying from the “right” path. Maybe escapism isn’t about avoidance after all, maybe it’s about freedom.
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