Issue 13: Girls, Girls, Girls
from Kate Moss to "cluttercore"
In the last edition of Soft Labor, I talked about the Gen Z-driven notion of the “girlfailure,” the young woman who revels in her awkward refusal to tread upon the Millennial’s well-worn, soft pink path into Girl Boss nirvana. As a tail-end Gen X-er, I loved the knowingly-dejected image conjured by New Feminism’s antihero — until I read about the (very) recent CDC report, which affirms that American teenagers — girls and LGBTQIA youth, in particular — are experiencing record levels of sadness and sexual trauma, the highest levels reported in over a decade. Here we are again.
As a teenager in the now-glorious 90s, I was one of those Prozac Nation-reading girls and therefore remain obsessed with popular culture’s depiction of the seemingly-languishing teen — and how little it has changed in its essence over my adult lifetime. Today’s visual permeation of the sad girl was created in the 1990s, lifted from popular culture, and refined by the American advertising industry to sell, well, jeans. Kate Moss’s “heroin chic” bum (or lack thereof ) sprawled across her bedroom floor and Houston Street in a 1999 Calvin Klein Jeans ad is, for me, one of the most ubiquitous, enduring images of (distinctly white, presumably middle-class) female ennui. This wasn’t lost on the culture: Both the Autumn 1999 and Winter 2000 issues of the stalwart watchdog Adbusters magazine critiqued the design and advertising apparatus that colluded to manufacture such images, even as their covers served to reify those very tropes.
