How 2023 Became The Year Of The #Girl
A friend of mine joked to me recently that her justification for buying a Vampire's Wife dress on Vestiaire Collective was that she'd be able to rent it out for £200, meaning she'd make its discounted £500 price tag back in no time at all. Welcome to 'Girl Math', terminology cooked up by TikTok, where the trend has been viewed more than 2 billion times, and is essentially a tongue-in-cheek manipulation of GCSE-level statistics to justify buying something you really, really want. Growing up is overrated; welcome to The Year of the Girl.
Crackers, pitta, a block of cheddar and miscellaneous snacks? 'Girl Dinner'. Closing your laptop at 4pm? 'Lazy Girl Jobs'. Crashing other people’s parties, eating off other people’s plates and sleeping in your makeup? 'Rat Girl Summer' (which, depending on your level of rodent compassion, is either wonderfully anarchic or woefully unhygienic). Barbie, the highest grossing film of 2023 – which exceeded $1billion at the box office - was also the biggest debut ever for a female director. It explored the image of the most famous fictional girl(s) of them all. Huns are on hiatus…behold the #girlies!
Girl dinner pic.twitter.com/GildeksvPo
— Taffy Brodesser-Akner (@taffyakner) July 9, 2023
On the surface, one could read this nouveau girl power movement as vapid, edging on the side of ignorant, in a year that has been punctuated by suffering. And yet, there’s something to be said for the kind of art – be it a meme shared, or a movie experienced – that embraces another primal urge. To replay, even if performatively, a more innocent time. One in which we were free from expectation and untouched by responsibility, and didn't have to consider anything remotely connected to tax, the rental market, or the depressingly relentless pursuit to achieve, well, anything.
'There is a sense of freedom in becoming yourself – before the domesticity and labour of adult life – that I think is always worth reconnecting with,' Claire Marie Healy tells ELLE, founder of archival practice and research studio Girlhood Studies, and author of a new book on the subject. 'How one does this may vary, from watching coming-of-age films to [listening to] certain music. It's not always this simplistic nostalgia: it’s about our layered selves.'
The word itself has a discomforting history. 'Girl' confuses, sometimes even angers, people. In the worst of cases, it is entrenched in sexism. In the wrong hands, it has the potential to make a person feel naive, infantilised or one-dimensional, and is often co-opted to underestimate someone (stupid/crazy/silly girl etc.). There’s a real feeling of wanting to reclaim the term as one of endearment. 'There’s an infinite amount of things you can do with language,' Casey Plett, author of A Safe Girl to Love and founder of LittlePuss Press, told The New York Times in 2023, 'to make new things and mold it to your own wishes.'
Youth — something that can feel simultaneously magical and mundane — is like a puzzle that will never be solved. Maybe, then, that’s why we’re so hellbent on never quite letting go of it? Filmmaker Sofia Coppola has returned to the theme extensively in her work since her cinematic debut nearly 25 years ago, next year placing the gaze firmly on a 14-year-old girl who falls for the charms of a global superstar, in Priscilla.
'I always like characters who are in the midst of a transition and trying to find their place in the world and their identity,' she shared with ROOKIE magazine in 2013. 'That is the most heightened when you’re a teenager.' If girldom is synonymous to finding oneself in a state of transition, then it makes sense that throughout our lives we keep returning to it. In other words, it’s tied to identity more than age. Whilst historically girlhood has been presented as primarily a limited period, Healy is interested in a more expansive definition. One that encompasses, 'a kind of shared aesthetic and shared experience,' she explains, 'and a way of seeing that carries with us well into womanhood.'
Today, being a girl is not about how old you are, which is gratifying considering we live in a youth-obsessed era constantly celebrating '30 under 30'. Nor is girl about gender, or the percentage of pink in your closet, or even how happy you are. It’s a sisterhood where everyone’s invited. A prefix of solidarity; united in our shared pleasures and pains. I loved writer Shon Fay’s descriptor of her second book, which is released in 2025, Love in Exile: 'it’s about love, sex, obsession and death. Just girly things.'
Girls just wanna have fun, sung Cyndi Lauper 40 years ago. Girls also wanna be shocking and silly and serious. Girls will post selfies on Instagram one day, a stream of consciousness on societal breakdown the next. Girls support other girls. Girls reserve the right to decide when that word is weaponised against them. There’s that old Groucho Marx gag, I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. Personally, I’m pretty happy about being part of this one.
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