Last weekend, I was invited to a 2016-themed party. We put on exaggerated make-up, wore clashing outfits, and played a reprehensible amount of Shawn Mendes. Judging by my Instagram feed, we’re not the only ones.
Throwback photos of tie-dye, flannel tops, and skinny jeans are the visual accompaniments to what seems to be a collective sense of nostalgia as we start the new year. Through the rose-gold spectacles, 2016 represents a time before everything was overproduced, over-optimised, and relentlessly monetised – a VSCO-filtered bygone era that thrived on experimentation. Embracing cringe looks like an act of self-liberation, an escape from the hyper-curation of the digital landscape in recent years. Could this nostalgia, bolstered by concomitant trends such as Zara Larsson’s polychromatic makeup, represent a cultural shift away from a fashion scene hegemonised by the pursuit of perfection? Could it, in other words, spell the death of the clean girl?
The clean girl has become ubiquitous throughout celebrity culture, magazines, and social media in recent years. Her brand prescribes a lifestyle, the impetus behind which is the curation of a kind of idealised minimalism. It’s no revelation that her practised effortlessness belies its unattainable requirements. The performance of the clean girl demands a level of privilege that ultimately celebrates wealth, thinness, whiteness, and able bodies; her lifestyle is only achievable if you’re already insulated financially, socially, and genetically.
The predominance of the clean girl has, of course, been challenged before. ‘Brat summer’ was heralded as a new era, the reincarnation of the ‘messy girl’ characterised by two day old mascara, tangled hair, and cigarette ash – it seemed like the clean girl was on her deathbed. But this wasn’t liberation. The pendulum swung back and the clean girl lived on, repackaged as ‘demure’, the corrective to the period of licensed messiness. Brat summer had exhausted its course, and to cling onto it was ‘cringe’. The clean girl, by contrast, was the grown-up standard, invested with a sense of moral superiority, to which social media dictated we return after a wild summer of temporary license.
In fashion, subcultures and their accompanying aesthetics are usually the product of a community, a unified worldview: punk was anti-establishment, goth was rooted in non-conformity, even 2016 boho-chic was inspired by the shared values of the moment. The clean girl, in contrast, has never been a subculture to belong to, but an aspirational standard. Innovation is replaced by prescription, community is supplanted by consumption. The clean girl aesthetic favours conformity, not creativity – she is inspired not by ideas, but by a shopping list. There is no shared ideology beyond the Pinterest board. Her make-up is stripped of its artistic potential, its aim becomes invisibility. Her fashion, narrowed and purged of variety, offers almost no room for interpretation, let alone expression. For the clean girl, fashion is a medium of emulation.
This is nothing new. The clean girl is a modernised iteration of a perennial aesthetic, upgraded with pilates and Erewhon. She is purity culture, quiet luxury, old-money minimalism made more palatable for a new generation. She is perfection – and perfection will always sell. This all-pervasive aesthetic has, in various different permutations, always been the norm; opposing aesthetics serve to define by opposition, and ultimately affirm, that norm. Like Kim Kardashian’s stripped-back house, ‘clean’ signifies distance from chaos, a glossy exterior that disguises its cost.
Despite what Sydney Sweeney might protest, fashion is and always will be political. It is the clean girl’s self-distancing from subversion, her very apoliticism that makes her a cultural lightning rod. The aesthetic, largely harmless in isolation, bleeds into wider, more pernicious social trends, such as the Ozempic craze, or the ‘tradwife’. The ‘no make-up’ look, neutral tones, and homely lifestyle amounts to rehearsed restraint, a whispered performance that politely declines to take up space. As self-expression is sacrificed for submission, and the male gaze is reasserted as the arbiter of ideal beauty, the clean girl implies a modest, non-threatening, domestic form of femininity.
With her rigid sleep schedule, workout routine, and curated minimalism, the clean girl lifestyle is an exercise in self-discipline. When women, and the population at large, are convinced to police themselves, they are much less likely to imagine alternatives. It’s easy to see how the clean girl culture of hyper-optimisation is a fundamentally capitalistic one. Consumption is marketed as self-improvement, beauty is transformed into duty, and self-expression mutates into self-exploitation.
In the visual economy of the digital age, appearance goes beyond individual expression, and becomes social, and even political, currency. Against the background of rising white nationalism, and the proliferation of AI generated media, appeals to authenticity feel futile. At any rate, if Pantone’s colour of the year is anything to go by, it seems likely that the clean girl will keep dodging assassination attempts – she’s always been here, and she’s not going anywhere.
