Early-aughts 'It' girl Cory Kennedy entering her 'hipster Martha Stewart' era pretty much sums up how millennials are gearing up for middle age

• Cory Kennedy was the internet's first "It" girl as a teenager in the early aughts.
• Now she represents a generation that has some economic power, and she just wants a house and garden.
• "I want to garden, like a freaking hipster Martha Stewart," Kennedy told New York Magazine.

You can still see the indie sleaze on Cory Kennedy's Instagram account: Photos of Kennedy as a teen-about-town in heavy eyeliner, blurry bar scenes, and ripped stockings, alongside other early-aughts icons like Lindsay Lohan and Alexa Chung.

It's a reminder of her time as "the internet's first 'It' girl," as New York Magazine dubbed her in a recent profile.

While the grunge look is firmly back in style — and still tinges the edges of Kennedy's look more than a decade later — the 33-year-old, who currently lives in Brooklyn, recently told New York Magazine that she's moving on from the lifestyle it evokes.

In fact, like many millennials who've aged out of their hard-partying 20s, Kennedy said she's ready for a new phase of life and recently closed on a house in Connecticut with her boyfriend.

"It's less people, more trees. I want to live this bucolic life," she told the magazine. "I want to garden, like a freaking hipster Martha Stewart."

Don't we all?

Many millennials, born between 1981 to 1996, have slogged through a debt-filled, paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle thrust upon them by two recessions, a roller-coaster job market, a student-debt crisis, and a massive housing shortage. It's led to stress, burnout, and a delay in major life milestones like marriage, buying a home, and starting a family.

But signs point to some in the generation finally crawling out of that financial hole. Millennials led the exodus from cities during the pandemic, opting for more suburban, exurban, or small-town living, and why trends like cottagecore and tiny homes dominate social-media feeds. 

Plus, like generations before them, millennials have simply grown up. While the psychological toll of economic stress could stick around for a while, some of us can now afford to ditch our time squatting on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette and focus on what Martha calls "the art of gardening."

From teenage dirtbag to proud homeowner

The #teenagedirtbag hashtag on TikTok has 2.7 billion views. That's a lot, even for TikTok.

The trend goes like this: Videos start off with someone — typically an elder millennial or Gen Xer — nodding along to a sped-up version of the 2000 banger "Teenage Dirtbag" by Wheatus. 

As the song launches into the chorus, the image switches to photos of that person as a teenager, wearing some '90s or early-aughts trend like baggy, low-slung jeans, tube tops, smudged eyeliner, or shell necklaces.

Today, many of those dirtbag teens have traded in their mesh trucker hats for kids and a mortgage. Despite a slow start, 62% of 40-year-olds now own their home, a recent report by Redfin found. That's not far off from Gen Xer and baby boomers' homeownership rates at the same age. 

It's one reason the academic Jean M. Twenge has thrown a wrench in the discourse about how the economy has screwed millennials. In her recent article in The Atlantic, Twenge said millennials have experienced "a breathtaking financial comeback" since the mid-2010s.

"Millennials, as a group, are not broke — they are, in fact, thriving economically," Twenge wrote. 

Since roughly 2015, millennial household wealth started to surpass that of previous generations at the same age. "By 2019, households headed by Millennials were making considerably more money than those headed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X at the same age, after adjusting for inflation," Twenge wrote.

It may have taken a while in the wake of the Great Recession, but millennials have finally started to hit those classic markers of adulthood in the same way their Gen X older siblings and boomer parents did. The myth of the millennial trapped in an endless cycle of trashy dive bars, avocado toast, and dead-end jobs has given way to a prosperous batch of new homeowners and parents slowly but steadily building wealth.

As millennials' wealth builds, however, their nostalgia for simpler times remains, as seen in the revival of aughts and '90s fashion. Even Martha Stewart jumped on the teenage-dirtbag train — though she could take some notes from Kennedy on the sleaze.