When I was a teenager in the early 2010s in the super middle-class city of Bath, there was little diversity of any description to be found anywhere. Girls on TV and in shop windows were still predominantly white, blonde-haired and blue-eyed – the most exotic feature you might find was a brunette. The ‘cool girls’ at my single-sex secondary school were also blonde.
They all had names like Tilly and Milly; they wore Jack Wills and Hollister; they played hockey and netball in skorts with their honey-coloured hair in braids (the same way they wore it in their photos from their skiing holidays). They were over-achievers and seemed to lead lives of Instagram filtered perfection, even at a time when the best phone you could have was a Blackberry.
To deviate from even one aspect of this mould of ‘popular’ was to deviate from its entirety. If you didn’t look like them, dress like them, and do the things they did, then, in the complex social ecosystem that is an all-girls secondary school, you couldn’t be one of them or anything they represented – you couldn’t be smart or interesting or beautiful.
If you exhibited anything outside of the confines of the popular mould, you knew you were a ‘nerd’ or a ‘weirdo’. These views weren’t necessarily spouted by these ‘cool girls’ alone – we all did our bit in gatekeeping this narrow idea of perfection. Even I, a mixed-race, under-achieving, emo kid upheld these sacred laws, tightening the space around myself until the only other option was to knowingly martyr myself on the altar of individuality.
"I don’t think I had a core sense of who I was, to be honest," my old school friend, Emily said of her secondary school experience. "Feeling accepted or cool was the big priority." We all know now that setting oneself aside for the sake of acceptance was probably the entirety of the cool girl’s modus operandi. Occasionally I see them around my hometown and they are as unrecognisable, as I must be.
Turns out they were trying just as hard to hold onto their crowns as the rest of us were to attain them or topple them. But we didn’t know that then, we just knew they had something we didn’t and, as intangible as it was, we all knew it was something we were supposed to want. Emily, who willingly sacrificed herself for the prize of acceptance, was still never one of the popular crowd – but being mediocre or invisible within the social structure was often preferable to the alternative.
Another school friend of mine, Ruby – a leggy blonde who might have found a place within the popular circle, had she not dated an emo kid, Laurie, who wore black eyeliner and nail varnish – echoed this sentiment from the other side of the social spectrum as she recalled her relationship as a way for her to rebel against the unachievable social and aesthetic standards.
She shares: "I guess going out with him made me feel cool because he wasn’t like anybody else, but really I didn’t like the stuff he liked at all. I think it was the whole idea of 'ooh we’re cool and mysterious and deep and edgy; we come from broken homes; we have so many issues and we have that in common, so let’s listen to god awful music and watch disgustingly gory films because we’re so unbothered’."
The sub-text is clear; we wanted to be everything they weren’t.
IT’S GONE MAINSTREAM
Today, young girls of all shapes, sizes and styles can find themselves represented in the media (not always perfectly, but they are there, as is the demand for aesthetic diversification). More importantly, they can represent themselves. Where society generally disregards teenage girls at best and hates them at worst, a loophole has been discovered – a largely unregulated medium where all those marginalised in the mainstream are able to platform themselves; to take themselves and their individual quirks mainstream.
The once small online communities created at the advent of mass social media by the exiled ‘uncool’ gained momentum, attracting likes and followers and contributors who offered legitimacy and refinement to the ‘uncool’ aesthetic. As they made themselves more visible in rapidly expanding online spaces, the more ‘mainstream’ they became, the harder it was to separate them into cool and not cool.
Things like cottagecore, dark academia and e-girl aesthetics have replaced their indie, alternative and emo ancestors and become 'cool' in popular culture. More conventional styles have also received an equal amount of aesthetic branding. You can no longer simply like wearing neutral clothing, fresh-faced natural makeup and a neat centre parting, you must be conforming to the clean girl aesthetic.
Being ‘conventional’ is no longer possible in a teen culture where, fifteen years ago, not being so was a cardinal sin. Now the worst thing a teenager can do is be ordinary. This is not to say all girls now suddenly live in harmony together, only that, as aesthetics have been democratised, the drama that makes up the life of a teenager will be less and less dependent upon personal taste.
Even picking one aesthetic and remaining within its boundaries is less and less typical. More common than seeing a true representative of anyone, sub-culture now is seeing young women able to explore a range of influences in their fashion and makeup.
Society has not quite caught up to this enlightened worldview. Why do girls feel the need to only bleach one half of their hair? It asks. Why would you wear makeup that makes you look like you have a cold?
It does not want to stop hating teenage culture. I, who still resent women I haven’t seen in ten years because I didn’t like their clothes when we were sixteen, envy them. Mostly.
THE THREE MINUTE PROBLEM
In the years since the advent of social media outlets, such as Instagram, Twitter and, most recently, TikTok, we have, one by one, offered our homes, wardrobes, food, faces and souls to the online community critics for judgement. It seemed shallow at first, and there was no shortage of critics lamenting the ‘death’ of face-to-face conversation, or how selfie sticks now exist.
What they ignored was the entire iceberg beneath the tip they were focusing on – important and difficult conversations suddenly became visible amongst all the memes and cat videos that grew into a rising chant, championing diversity, marginalised voices and intersectional representation. No one knew then the extent to which this would affect the real social world we inhabited offline. Some were resentful at first, claiming that online activism wasn’t real activism. How wrong they were. But who could have foreseen just how far social media would reach into our lives – the industries that would be created through sponsored Instagram posts; fake news; selfies... It’s understandable that people would be afraid of the exponential reach social media has had in society, and it is reliable of human nature to turn that fear into a terrifying new moral panic: cancel culture.
We probably associate cancel culture with Twitter – the online domain of dynamic, contentious millennials – rather than TikTok, which last year recorded one billion active account holders, approximately 40 per cent of which are aged between 16 and 24. It is best known for platforming short-form, trend-focused youth culture.
There are currently 7.8 billion views under #feminism on TikTok, less than the 128.2 billion under #fashion. TikTok’s algorithm works so if you happen to like one #feminism video, you will be shown a plethora of others, all demonstrating what it is in three minutes or less.
"It really is the ultimate in short-form social media," says Ruby. "Like you can get a three-minute fashion video or a three minute video of someone trying to break down white privilege."
Another TikTok user, Emma, feels the same: "Sometimes I agree with it, sometimes I don’t. There are things that go too far and it’s not something I really relate to or want to watch but it’s unavoidable." And this is really the issue – the two exist side-by-side, contained and aestheticised within the parameters of a three-minute video.
The narrative that 'cancel-culture' is a weapon wielded by the young to attack older generations who are failing to keep up with the times – that there is a Gen Z hive mind conspiring to forcibly impose leftist agenda – is as silly as the thought of Victorian men fearing the destruction of society at the sight of a woman on a bicycle.
Not just because cancel culture is little more than a catchy phrase which is mainly used to invalidate the marginalised voices who supposedly control it, but because the fear of being forbidden to participate in something so prevalent in daily life for saying the wrong thing is frightening to everyone. Our lives are online. It is difficult to exist in the world without some form of social media, even if you’re not TikTok famous.
For teenagers who can’t remember a time before smartphones, the thought of being publicly rejected and attacked in the name of social justice could understandably be a source of latent anxiety. There is an apparent disconnect here for a generation so concerned with championing self-expression.
Maybe a part of the reason for the more democratic attitude towards self-expression through fashion is a response to the internalised fear of self-expression through opinion. ‘Be yourself’ Gen Z proclaims outwardly, all the while knowing what happens to people who deviate from the TikTok narrative. Is it any wonder that a restricted freedom to express opinion might manifest as a need for greater acceptance of self-expression through fashion?
TikTok, Tumblr, Instagram all might seem to have veiling reputations for depthless but innocuous Gen Z furore because that is what they should be – safe spaces for expression and experimentation. Colliding with the realities of the real world is inevitable, but it becomes problematic when those realities are associated with a moral panic that even adults have not found a solution to or even, in most cases, are responsible for inciting.
How faithfully this analysis renders the lived experiences of teenagehood as it plays out in secondary school corridors is difficult to say, but there must be some degree of truth for a generation who have conceptualised and altered our understanding of teenage aesthetics beyond any precedent measure.
In a time when half the life you live is uploaded, it’s no surprise that another name for Generation Z is the ‘Anxiety Generation’.
Edited by Michelle Almeida