Recently, I looked out of my window and spotted a street urchin. “You there, boy,” I yelled. “Are you partaking in a hot girl summer? A healing girl summer? Perhaps even a feral girl summer?” He didn’t know what I was talking about. He didn’t engage when I asked him if Love Island perpetuates toxic ideas about love and gender. He showed signs of the dissociative pout, another thing he had not heard of. I left the young waif – not to be confused with the elusive Waif Girl – on his travels, but he got me thinking.
The way we understand online trends in 2022 is not dissimilar to how we picked up on trends as children. Briefly falling behind on the Instagram algorithm is like being off sick from school for a week and returning to the playground to find everyone’s wrists ringed by Silly Bandz. Even calling them trends feels more than a touch generous. They’re the definition of niche. Their lifecycle is clear at this point: a TikToker has a thought, then that thought gets picked up by an editor or writer, then it becomes explicated to within an inch of its life. A bit like what I’m doing right now.
