welcome to missed connection where I recommend a book to someone I was too distant from or distracted by or shy to actually… recommend a book to.
Dear clean dinner coastal coquette bow-wearing eclectic grandpa cowgirl,
I am so fucking bored by all of these people on the internet who have decided that style is dead and you killed it. We killed it, because I don’t mind throwing on my cowgirl boots and going for a glass of orange wine in a bar with sticky floors in Williamsburg. These lectures about trends and the death of style have started popping up like dandelions after a rainstorm and I’m finding it increasingly tedious. I don’t actually care who still loves the clean tomato ballet core girl trend. Mob wife? Hot. That girl? You are. I woke up one day last week and my for you page was suddenly full of women who had ripped off their pink bows, ground them into the dirt with their Rothy’s ballet flats, and decided that trends were the root of all evil.
I think what’s most bothering me is how we’ve moved beyond adopting what we call aesthetics or micro-trends into our personal style to adopting other people’s ideas into our personal systems of belief. If we aren’t subscribed to and aligned with the latest and greatest and most correct idea, and sharing it on our substacks and instagram stories, we’re wrong. Or worse, we’re Offensive. We’re not in touch. We are bad. We are so, so scared of being bad. Why is that?
Here’s how I feel: there’s room in my closet and in how I experience style to play with a pop of red or a slicked back hairstyle. But there is something that makes me really uneasy about scrolling through my for you page and seeing face after beautiful face denouncing aesthetics, distraught about the death of personal style when these same people were just sharing ballet-core inspiration pictures from their Pinterests mere months ago. I feel like I’m living in an echo chamber in which everyone is screeching at warp speed and I’m not just tired, I’m bored. My head hurts.
Listen, I agree: it’s all kind of silly, the micro-trends and categories. We have catchy phrases to describe every thought or predilection. The concept of girl math is kind of demeaning. But it also made me laugh, made me feel in on a joke, gave me a phrase to reckon with my financial (il)literacy. And you know what? After thinking about my financial situation over the summer, at the height of girl math, I signed up for a Roth IRA on Ellevest, an investing platform for women. That’s girl math too. And I’m going to tell you something that will probably get me banished from the internet (this week, at least) but I hosted a girl dinner party at my apartment last fall and I would do it again this weekend if I could afford to spend another small fortune on cheese and olives and chicken fingers. I like having space to explore my femininity. I’m an intelligent and capable woman but it is so lovely to keep that delicate, sweet experience of girlhood close by. It makes me tender. It makes me creative. It certainly makes me a better writer. It makes me think of Madeline L’engle:
“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide… Far too many people misunderstand what ‘putting away childish things’ means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and ‘be’ fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grown-up.”
I do not want to put my hair in pigtails, bury my head in the sand, and let the world burn down while I curate my Pinterest board. But I’m also not going to be forced into pretending like I didn’t enjoy seeing the girls dressed up in their coastal grandma getups. I’m not going to feel forced into relinquishing the very few things that still feel like fun and play.
If trends are not for you, if you woke up last Monday and suddenly realized that it is, in fact, quite alarming that we live in a late stage capitalist hellscape and are still concerned about making sure our red socks peek out just the perfect amount beneath our Reformation jeans, that is fine. That is fair. But if we’re going to change our minds, can we talk about that, too? Can we talk about the nuance of enjoying something that left unchecked can be harmful? Can we have a discussion about moderation and hypocrisy? It is making me feel actually fucking coocoo cocoa puffs that 80% of the content I consume has sharply pivoted from cute OOTDs to lectures on how partaking in the micro-trend aesthetics game is sheer awfulness, the death of humanity. Here are some words I’ve come across this week in think pieces and posts about trends and the people who love them: nonsense, soulless, shit, tired, crazed.
I agree with some of the points being made but what happens when being disdainful of trends becomes a trend? What happens when all of the coastal cowgirls climb up on their high horses and gallop away?
Anyway, if you’re interested in the concept of aesthetics (which includes but isn’t limited to all these trends that are making us so emotional all of a sudden), Elif Batuman’s duo of novels explores this from the point of view of one of my favorite protagonists. The Idiot (the first book in the two-part series) and Either/Or follow a girl named Selin who we meet as she is beginning her freshman year in college.
God, what a fraught time! It surprised me, how much I loved being immersed in this world that reminded me of a time when everything felt so charged and urgent and high stakes. From the boys I kissed at parties to the particular pair of shoes I decided to wear out on a Thursday night, the painting purchased from a flea market that I determined would transform my bedroom with tilted floors in a creaky old house near campus into an chic artist’s garret: it was all so crucial, so important. I think what I loved about the novels was how Selin exists, how she interprets the high-stakes much more introspectively and intelligently than I could at that age.
“It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. “Ethics” meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called “golden,” like the golden ratio.”
The relationship between ethics and aesthetics definitely was not something top of mind as I was nervously brandishing my fake ID at sticky bars in upstate South Carolina but at 18, I was absolutely tortured by who I was. I loved Selin, this precocious teenager who is preoccupied with what her life should mean, which is maybe not so different from the question of identity. And I think the question of identity is maybe what all this griping and obsessing over trends is about.
Although immensely intelligent, Selin is still very much a teenager when we first meet her: “I preferred to take highly specific classes with interesting titles, even when I hadn’t taken the prerequisites and had no idea what was going on. I could see how my way might be called aesthetic,” she says.
Sometimes I find myself making playlists full of songs that have good titles or fit into some painting in my mind of a mood or person I think I should be or wish I was. I’m twenty-eight, maybe too old to still care about how I’m perceived. But is that so bad, if the person I care to impress with my aesthetic is myself?
This is turning into word salad. I feel like I’ve changed my mind six times in the writing of this letter to you, but one thing I’m sure of is that this millennial pink book is such a perfect portrait of what it is to be young and yearning. One of Selin’s new friends asks, “It’s so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious…I mean, what are you supposed to do if you really happen to feel like you’ve swallowed the universe? Not say so?”
It is so gorgeous to be sincere, to love the things you love. I want to know if you’ve swallowed the universe and are wiping stardust from the corners of your lips. I want to know what you’re yearning for, what you care about, even if someone else deems it micro or soulless or silly. I do. It’s not.
I love you!
Stuart
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