Do we really want Clueless updated to reflect our dark, digital age? Ugh! As if!

Thirty years after the film, the musical version makes no excuses for being a nostalgia-fest

- Kate Maltby

Who needs to learn to park? “Everywhere you go has valet!” Cher Horowitz, teen heroine of 1995 cult movie Clueless, is one of the most spoilt and entitled characters ever to have appeared on screen. She is also, with her irrepressible urge to solve other people’s problems and her coltish steps towards self-knowledge, one of the most endearing. Millennial women like me, who grew up watching the movie again at every sleepover, will defend her against all comers.

Instead, I took one of my oldest friends from school and we had a blast. My only regret is that neither of us had the energy to replicate Cher’s yellow-and-black tweed miniskirt. Not since Shakespeare’s Malvolio first burst on to the stage in yellow cross-garters has an erotomaniac wasp look-alike left such a cultural footprint.

Yet it’s not clear how long producers can keep pumping these familiar stories through the intellectual property reconfiguration mill. Teen life has changed since the turn of the millennium. The protagonists of Clueless and Mean Girls were defined by their deft navigation of in-group/out-group bullying, but their real-life descendants have to handle social media, online misogyny and constant requests for nudes.

Even the heroines of Legally Blonde or The Devil Wears Prada represent young women now entering an increasingly fraught and fast-paced professional landscape. Most notable, however, is the experience gap between high school pre and post social media. The smartphone shift turns Hollywood's teen movies from contemporary social commentary to retro relic.