If you’re not already following her, Jersey City resident Jenna Barclay has most likely popped up on your suggested Instagram posts or TikTok ‘For You’ page. Jenna is a social media expert and content creator with a focus on nostalgia content. Jenna’s particular niche is late 1990s and early 2000s style, fashion, and lifestyle. Jenna was inspired by a trip to her childhood home to share her finds. Her first few videos were hits, and the rest is history. The Hoboken Girl caught up with Jenna to learn more about her background, her businesses, and why nostalgia is just so irresistible. Read on to learn all about Jenna Barclay, TikTok star and Jersey City local.
About Jenna
Jenna is from a small town called Galesville, WI. “There is one stoplight in the whole county and it happened to be in my town,” she said. She went to college at the University of Northern Texas and also got her Master’s degree there, both in Communication Studies.
(Photo credits: @jennaabarclay)
Jenna ended up in Hoboken after college and kept up her Mile Square connections during grad school, when she would spend the summers working for New York University. While living on campus at NYU during those summers, she knew that life was better across the Hudson. She moved back to Hoboken in 2012 after grad school and moved to Jersey City in 2015. She now lives in Paulus Hook with her husband, Joe Testa, and their French Bulldog, Daisy.
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Currently, Jenna has her own social media businesses and is a full-time content creator. She says she’s had “every job under the sun” on the way to her current role. “I worked in marketing and sales. I also worked in fitness,” she said. “I’ve managed fitness studios around the area, and both taught and worked at tons of studios.” Locally, Jenna taught at the Pure Barre studio in Jersey City. Like many industries, the fitness industry was hit hard and fast by pandemic-related changes. Jenna left the fitness industry to focus on her side hustle: social media. “I had been doing freelance social media for businesses on the side because it was something I enjoyed,” she said.
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Around the same time Jenna left the fitness industry to focus on her social media business, she started making TikToks. “I was able to switch full-time to social media,” she said. A trip back to her childhood home in Galesville in 2021 inspired her nostalgia videos. “My mom had been begging me for literal years to clean out my bedroom,” Jenna said. “I was going through some stuff and made a short video of an outfit I found to share with friends.” A few weeks later, she put the video on TikTok and it went viral. “It was crazy,” she said. “People loved it, and I had an entire bedroom full of all kinds of stuff from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Not just clothes but cosmetics, magazines, accessories, everything.”
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Jenna’s Page
Now, Jenna has her own TikTok (181.5K followers), Instagram (103K followers), and YouTube (92.1 subscribers) pages. She says that some of the most fun parts of her work are hearing from viewers. “People will notice a prop in the background of the video and it’s something that they had growing up,” she said. “They get so excited.” Jenna also said that hearing from Galesville connections, even a few degrees removed, is always a bright spot. “It’s wild to me that someone will reach out and say that they went to college with someone from my town,” she said. In addition, she hears from users who use her videos as creative fodder for their current looks. “I have younger followers on TikTok who tell me they use my videos for inspiration for their current outfits. On YouTube, the audience is even younger and they’ll ask for styling videos for certain items.”
(Photo credits: @jennaabarclay)
While there are hundreds of nostalgia creators on TikTok, Jenna says that what sets her apart is that everything she uses in her videos is either something she owned from the time period or something inspired by photos or memories of her own life. “I will use photos from high school as a reference to create an outfit and maybe look on eBay or somewhere for the right type of item,” she said. “Things that I buy are either things I actually owned at one point or as close as possible to what I owned,” she said. “I’m not making teen movie-type outfits, everything is very specific to my own life.”
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A fun side effect of the success of Jenna’s nostalgia page is that she’s visiting her mom more. “At first, I found these things by chance, but now I am on the lookout for more things to incorporate into videos,” Jenna said. “My mom purposefully kept a lot of things so I have this whole stash.” A lot of the non-clothing items are from the 1990s, Jenna said. “It’s things like Barbies, Furbies, VHS tapes. A ton of tapes that are VCR — recorded TV shows,” she said. “So you have this old show, plus the old commercials, stuff like that. Mostly from the late 1990s and early 2000s.”
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At the same time that nostalgia of all eras is becoming popular on social media, current fashion trends are heavily influenced by the late 1990s and early 2000s. Thankfully, the low-rise jeans are staying in the past, but the small, rectangular sunglasses, the platform shoes, and the bucket hats are back. “It’s interesting to dive into these trends while they’re coming back, it’s the 20-30 fashion cycle that we’ve always seen. For example, the 1970s influence on 2000s fashion, the 1970s impact on 1990s fashion., Jenna said. “People reach middle age and want to reminisce about their childhood, when life was simple and more carefree. The prevalence of social media and users being able to curate what they see leads to that happening in a way that feels more present.”
And then there’s the pandemic effect. “The pandemic intensified this – people moved home to their actual childhood homes. People nested more and there’s a boom in collecting,” Jenna said. “All of these things happened when there’s a sense of fear and insecurity in society that leads to these waves of nostalgia.”
