From the V&A’s blockbuster David Bowie Is to more recent shows dedicated to Taylor Swift, Björk and Amy Winehouse, exhibitions drawn from the archives of pop stars have become a major part of museum programming the past decade or so. When built around a bankable star, fans book tickets in their thousands to experience the worlds built by their icons through costumes, photography and ephemera. But what of the worlds built by fans themselves?

I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective is an exhibition at the Barbican’s music library documenting fans of the early 2000s emo wave. Spearheaded by American groups My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, this version of emo was a poppier, more theatrical evolution of the genre that originated from 1980s hardcore. It also found more mainstream success, with bands signing to major labels and inspiring an intense, largely teenage fandom who related to lyrics about social alienation and out-sized emotion. From the outside, the emo was identifiable from budget versions of their idols’ looks — band t-shirts, studded belts and dyed black hair — but the alignment ran deeper than surface-level signifiers, inspiring fans to make art, writing and music of their own.

Unlike shows about older subcultures — such as the Fashion and Textile Museum’s current exhibition on ‘80s London club kids, Outlaws – I’m Not Okay is put together not by academics or museum curators, but by fans. The exhibition is the latest project from the Museum of Youth Culture, a nomadic institution which has previously hosted pop-up exhibitions and displays with themes including hairstyling, the Windrush and electronic music cultures.

I’m Not Okay announces itself with the solemnity of a mannequin wearing a My Chemical Romance ‘REVENGE’ hoodie, and a huge wall of fan-contributed images — hundreds of sweeping fringes, band t-shirts and stacked plastic bracelets. Teenagers gather in groups or pose solo in their rooms, with attached commentary revealing the majority come from small towns — a subcultural tale as old as time.

But, as with concurrent sub- and fan cultures in the early-to-mid ‘00s — such as grime, bloghaus, and the Strokes-led New York indie wave — the lives on display were shaped by the internet. The groups of friends pictured here often met online, and the photographs on display are largely cribbed from old Myspace and Photobucket accounts. Around the corner, there’s life-sized reproductions of the front row at an MCR in-store performance, and another wall displays a collage of fan site and Myspace profile screenshots — a crude but effective way of bringing an online moment into the tangible world, like a living fanzine.

These fan images are accompanied by memorabilia and ephemera: CDs, magazine clippings, posters and merchandise. These are divided into sections, but the relevance of the items on display arguably varies — the most exciting is a display case of signed ticket stubs, setlists and wristbands all donated by a fan named Chelsea Woods; the most questionable are prominently displayed Drop Dead Clothing hoodies and accessories designed by Oli Sykes of Bring Me The Horizon, which may have been quintessential to some people’s emo experience but which I admittedly had never seen before. There’s also a couple of cases of fan-made art, diaries and t-shirts which would have been amazing to see expanded upon.

The exhibition struggles with documenting a subcultural moment that happened so recently, most evidently in how it claims more general Y2K phenomena as inherently emo. It’s fun to see a display of ubiquitous mid-‘00s phones — a pink Motorola Razr, a Sidekick, a first-generation iPhone — on display amongst the CDs and magazine clippings, but these pieces of technology are surely nostalgic for anyone who was young at the time, rather than specifically synonymous with the emo scene. This lack of definition could be due to a lack of distance, or a downside of an exhibition created without any academic objectivity.

Similarly, the geographic focus is muddled by the inclusion of some American fans on the otherwise UK-focused photo wall. Understandably the inclination of a fan-produced project is to include everyone, but because of the differences in the scenes — from the popularity of certain bands, to subtle differences in fashion and styling — it would make more sense to either focus on one geographic area entirely, or to include more dynamic comparison of the two.

It’s a cliche that every conversation about emo comes round to a disagreement over the definition of emo. In I’m Not Okay, the focus is explicitly on emo fandom from 2004 to 2009, which, although understandable in logistical terms, points to a wider, short-sighted phenomenon of framing emo as a defined cultural moment, and a nostalgic one at that.

The weekend after I visited the exhibition, the fourth edition of the When We Were Young festival took place in Las Vegas, with My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy joint headlining a line-up of over 60 bands associated with the ‘00s wave of emo. The criticisms of nostalgic framing also apply to the festival, but the sets themselves (albeit viewed, in my case, via Instagram live broadcasts, rather than in person) told a different story. My Chemical Romance’s headline performance of their landmark 2006 album The Black Parade showcased a band on top of its game, capable of wringing endless vitality even from a set of songs nearly two decades old. Several bands on the line-up — most notably New Jersey post-hardcore legends Thursday, an unfortunate omission from the Barbican exhibition — made some of their most interesting work post-2009, and are still making good work today.

It’s a shame that this ongoing creative energy isn’t reflected in I’m Not Okay, but it’s more of a shame that the exhibition does not show how emo continues to affect the lives and creativity of fans today. It’s cute to see GCSE Art sketchbooks filled with fan art and drawings of sad girls with sweeping fringes, but wouldn’t it be more meaningful to trace the longer influences of emo on the more mature (or not) visual art, writing, zines and music being made by fans twenty years later? Like writer Marianne Eloise’s Emo Diary project, a series of zines recontextualising her teenage emo fandom with often humorous hindsight; or underground musician Claire Rousay’s ‘emo ambient’ t-shirts and on-stage installation of her bedroom as a performance space, which demonstrate how the legacy of emo fandom shows up in more unexpected creative outlets.

Considering that 2000s emo is seeing a renaissance among today’s teenagers, it would also be exciting to see how its looks, symbols and meanings are being adopted and adapted by a new generation — from Gen Z emo kids showing off their looks on TikTok and Instagram instead of MySpace, to My Chemical Romance fans making zines like Unkillible, about the intersection of MCR fandom and disability.

This would be a much more difficult, longer-term project, but a worthwhile one. In the meantime, I’m Not Okay — like the teenage lives it depicts — is an exhibition with a lot of potential that appears still arrested in its early stages.