In the '90s, around mid-July, every jerkwad Target, KMart, Sears, Walmart, and Office Depot location would start advertising their "Back to School" stuff right in the middle of summer as a horrible omen of what was to come: the next school year. The only consolation was that the '90s was a decade of loud colors, appealing to kids by making everything into the coolest school supplies.
If you didn't have to most awesome '90s school supplies, you weren't ostracized, but you definitely weren't cool. You'd sit there with your sharpened #2 pencils, off-brand crayons and boring pencil bag, wishing your parents had sprung for the cooler stuff. This is a list of all the cool stuff we either wish we had or remember having in school during the '90s. We would all lose everything by about the third week, but those first three weeks of awesome stationary and every color of gel pen were really, really awesome.
The best '90s school supplies were the ones that they had commercials for on TV, trying to convince young students that normal pens were for old people. These are the greatest, most nostalgia-inducing '90s pencils, '90s stationary, and nostalgic '90s school supplies (Lisa Frank included), ranked in order of awesomeness by voters who knew what it mean to cool for school in the 1990s.
