Janine DeMichele Baggett Heals Her Inner Child with Nostalgic ‘90s Skits

20 July 2025

Janine Baggett in a pink jacket. Credit : Janine Baggett

When Janine DeMichele Baggett, now 36, launched her TikTok channel earlier this year she began something that would resonate far deeper than she’d expected. Raised in a conservative religious household that forbade pop culture, she missed entire swaths of what many consider quintessential childhood experiences. Now, after moving from Atlanta to New York and enduring Broadway auditions and pandemic lockdowns, she turned to social media and rediscovered her voice through nostalgic skits that recreate the 1990s and early 2000s with surprising tenderness and precision.

Baggett’s stories often begin with a thrifted wig, silver eyeshadow a nod to her youth and meticulous research. She rifles through old Sears and JCPenney catalogs, delves into music videos of the era, and outfits herself in the kitchen tile patterns, the shoulder-padded jean jackets, and the flashback tropes of movies she never got to watch as a child. One skit features a suburban mom singing cheesy pop tunes while cleaning, another evokes the teenage angst of a 2001 high school hallway. Each video is a small window into the world she never inhabited a way to claim what was missing.

What started as playful experimentation quickly fostered an audience drawn to collective longing. Her flashback-to-‘90s-movies piece went viral, and followers in their 30s related instantly to the simplicity, the sense of community, and the era before screens ruled every waking moment. "We all missed that era," she says. "It was the last time before the internet consumed us. It brings a peaceful feeling." Indeed her authenticity shines through. She often emphasizes that while she appreciates the internet, she also longs for a time when it was something used briefly, not a permanent state of existence.

Baggett’s work is steeped in emotional resonance when she dons her ‘90s mom costume and croons a pop hit she’s tapping into more than nostalgia, she’s channeling years of repression and rediscovery. Raised under strict church rules she had only furtive exposure to mainstream songs or teenage rituals. Now, playing them back in vivid black-and-white: it’s catharsis, healing, and reclamation all at once. "I’m reliving things I wasn’t allowed to," she says, "and I found freedom in that as I deconstructed the strict beliefs I grew up under"

The pandemic acted as a turning point. With Broadway sidelined, Baggett began filming short pieces from her New York apartment. One early hit reached millions, opening the floodgates. Since then she’s consistently recreated era-specific settings: terms such as “90s kitchen decor” or “classic flashback trope” became her recurring themes, each skit a deep dive into style, demeanor, and sound. Her audience includes fellow millennials who share her memories and parents looking to revisit a simpler time.

Although Baggett now leverages online platforms to keep her career alive, she holds a soft spot for the unplugged life she grew up hearing about. She notes how kids back then would ride bikes to friends’ houses or spend summer days offline in blissful ignorance. Her commentaries on community, freedom, and analog connection resonate far beyond nostalgia they tap into a social yearning for human connection over digital distraction.

Behind the scenes she researches each outfit and line carefully. She scours thrift shops and online marketplaces like Poshmark and eBay to recreate the feel of Sears tops and early 2000s jeans. Despite her painstaking detail, she remains humble: she rarely has anything from her actual childhood, so these bits are born from collective memory, not personal relics

Baggett’s rise is a testament to the power of storytelling rooted in emotion and memory. In a world saturated by content, her skits stand out as intimate and resonant. They transport viewers into simpler times through nostalgia that’s almost therapeutic. Whether it’s a one-liner about a mom with a perm and a jean jacket or a vignette of a teenager at a renamed mall, her audience understands the unspoken message: these small moments shaped us.

In the swell of social media trends, where viral challenges dominate, Baggett’s success proves there is power in quiet retrospection. She invites us to revisit our younger selves not with irony but with sincerity not to mock an era, but to mourn its loss and celebrate its comfort. Through these skits she restores little fragments of childhood to her internal landscape and if you close your eyes at just the right moment, you might feel those fragments still living inside you too.