How Pen15's design team perfectly captured the early-2000s middle-school teen aesthetic

Vulture

Production designer Grace Alie and her best friend, set decorator Ali Rubinfeld, mined their own childhoods for visual inspiration on the Hulu comedy. “Very early on, Ali and I kind of reminisced on our own bedrooms and our own siblings’ bedrooms and pulled together all of these lost memories of specific set-decoration pieces,” Alie tells Vulture. “We pulled from actual details of growing up in that era.” For Maya's room, she adds, "we eBayed actual Teen Beat magazines and cut them up and collaged onto her wall." It wasn't that difficult, however, to transform middle schools into the modern day. “It’s kind of shocking how little schools change,” she says.