Despite my best efforts, TikTok’s algorithm has understood that I am deeply consumerist.
Lying in bed before Christmas in my unchanged teenage bedroom (a poster of Kurt Cobain floating above my head, naturally), I have nothing to do but watch. A young woman, bleached blonde hair (her roots tastefully showing in that slightly edgy but still put-together way), oversized colorful jumper and all, points at images popping up behind her face. 2023 Christmas gift recommendations: here’s a necklace, the pendant is shrimp-shaped and looks handmade! Here’s a candle, except the wax has been melted into what looks like a sardine can! I get dozens of TikToks like these, all young women pointing at pictures of slightly overpriced items to forget on a table, jewelry to stack, prints to put on your quirky kitchen’s walls. After twenty minutes, my head feels too heavy for my own body, resonating with their words: isn’t it fun? Isn’t it cute? It’s a small creator! I love the details! Here’s how to elevate your personal style! Then again, isn’t it so cute? (Why isn’t it yours already?)
I save all the videos. I do want odd little things – maybe then I will seem fun in subtle, sophisticated ways. I have always loved the idea of finding perfect things, special no matter how small. My lighter is from the 1960s and golden; my favorite lipstick is in a red, glossy case that looks like crocodile skin; my notebook is a 1914 planner with a few torn pages; the ashtray I burn scented paper in is swan-shaped, the smoke escapes along its wings. I understand the appeal of things so unique and (slightly) tacky they can only be yours.
(I might buy the candle, I like sardines.)
My pre-Christmas algorithm kept throwing cool girl gift recommendations at me for the following days (and I kept watching). Cool girls, I am told, love T-shirts adorned with wonky drawings; jewelry with irregular surfaces; hand-painted love notes on off-white plates; pinks and reds; bows, bows everywhere, glued and drawn and sewn on; odd mismatched charms; once-outmoded personalized accessories and stationary; little hearts and trinkets and small plates to gather the trinkets; jagged-edged jumpers; matchboxes with their childish patterns; badly embroidered napkins! It looks handmade, with love and uneven skills – except none of it is.
The aesthetic zeitgeist seems to reside in the detailed, the small, and the flawed. Objects and patterns have wobbly, wonky lines. Recurring themes are all tender; bows and hearts, preferably slightly misshapen, are not to be excluded. It is also playful: there are patterns of crooked martini glasses, lopsided lobsters, bumpy oysters – a lighter resembling a lonely cowboy boot, lemon-shaped candles, or uneven vichy cloths. The clothes have embroidered details in common, as well as their manufactured flaws and pretense of vulnerability. Even tattoo artists have caught up with the trend, making flash sheets of fine-line birds and imperfect lambs. It all adopts the air of the soft, of the thoroughly personal.
What seems now to be trendy taste, this collective sensibility shift towards the soft and the flawed, is far from surprising. Innumerable articles have been written about our sudden love for maximalist furniture during the pandemic: it was colorful, in pinks and yellows, bubble-like and checkered. The rooms had bright blue walls; on them hung digital art prints and huge mirrors whose white, textured frames looked like clouds; the couch looked like dozens of perfectly symmetrical fabric balls glued together; the wardrobe was full of bright clothing, oversized pink pants and cropped vests with swirling patterns. The maximalist interiors and outfits were joyous – or childish, depending on your own inclinations.
A return to the aesthetics of girlhood has been observed (and much commented upon) in recent times. This is clearly a part of it: hearts, frills, lace, doves, bows – all of it is there. But this time it’s not packaged in a sexualized, coquette aesthetic; it is less frilly, more personal and flawed. It is girlhood as internalized, as lived in a bedroom: I have spent a large portion of my childhood and early teenage years trying to embroider clothing without success, taping plastic flowers to boxes or dried ones to the walls, trying to make the small beautiful, trying to make the beautiful mine. In a sense, the current trend reminds me of those failed attempts at prettiness, and the prettiness residing precisely in the failure. Lopsided and inward as an aesthetic, it reminds of the deep gendered pleasure in seeing yourself in the objects you own: in curating and modifying, even imperfectly, until everything feels truly personal, truly like a self. The poems and love notes in an uneven handwriting printed on clothes, the delicate, badly embossed swans of a ring, the bows on irregularly knitted sweaters: all of it reminds of girls’ frequent attempts at sublimating the small, daily things. There is comfort in it, the whiff of a receding world of failed DIY projects and bedroom walls covered in magazine clippings. It is the grown-up version of these childish things we can’t quite give up, with oysters and martini glasses as fun patterns on expensive items, reflecting both the sophisticated adult and the girl within.
The trend was often analyzed as a counter-reaction to the minimalist, sleek aesthetic pushed by most influencers for years: white walls for your white flooring, beige skin-tight crop tops, discreetly manicured nails, hair pushed back in the most rigid bun you have ever laid eyes upon, simple golden jewelry, unfathomably expensive sportswear and coffee orders. But the 2020 maximalism also was a way to reclaim one’s sense of self by making the home – the only place there was during lockdown – a joyful, colorful place. Though patterns were playful, colors plentiful, and shapes dizzying, surfaces tended to be polished and plain, patterns perfectly symmetrical. The maximalist objects remained distant, artificial-looking, as if emerging out of a video game: they were, in a sense, thoroughly digital.
The current shift – this vulnerable chic – marks a stark contrast with the previous trends by finding both comfort and glamor in the flawed, the ornate, the almost tacky. Polished and sleek is out; your grandma’s crochet and bad drawings, printed on just about anything, are in.
This shift seems to be a much-needed revenge of the detailed and personalized in mainstream fashion. It is a refreshing shift, as it finally allows for vulnerability and flaw. In this sense, it is closer to the cottagecore aesthetic, with its pastoral grandeur, its yearning for homemade bread, a house in the country, long prairie dresses (and the lesbian commune we all desire). The logics of vulnerable chic and cottagecore are in fact very similar: they both express a deep need for escapism, a longing for imperfection, for items that look reassuringly old, for a reality that isn’t the one you’re currently in. It expresses the desire for a world where you don’t have an alienating job; where you aren’t addicted to your phone and have time to focus on the small, the slow, the imperfect; you have long homemade meals in settings that are yours; you practice a craft of some kind (or look like you do). Both aesthetics are aesthetics of the real. Neither, however, can avoid their own contradictions once they’ve become trendy – and for vulnerable chic the personal gets mass-produced, fast-fashion stores sell replicas of your (bad) DIY clay jewelry, spontaneity and vulnerability become staged.
Vulnerable chic is, also, a matter of scale: in interior decoration it leaves behind the tasteful combination of big vases and beautiful, large frames for clusters of small, personal items that seem to gather organically, thoughtlessly coupled. Similarly, fashion turns away from minimalist clothing and embraces layered outfits, with clashing patterns and fabrics, full of small, accumulated details and accessories. This shift away from the ostensibly curated towards an air of the spontaneous and the personal clearly mirrors the general shift on social media away from the clearly staged and flawless to the pseudo-casual, random (yet perfectly cool) photo dump. This change is best exemplified by the typical it-girl dinner of our time: the menu is written in crayons, the cloth napkins have uneven edges, and the cake is lopsided and burdened with kitsch frosting and pounds of currant – pictures of it all will be blurry and zoomed-in. Away from the glossy, into the personal: it is home, it is curated.
The sudden love for wonky embroidery and kitsch silverware also marks an important comeback of ornament. Details have long been banished from clothing and furniture: the appeal of simple lines and, most importantly, cheap mass production had defeated lace, embossing, engraving, and embroidery. Vulnerable chic might be the revenge of details, of the small. It is, in a sense, a revolt against the bare. Along with it has come a resurgence in popularity for the personalized: from pillowcases to bags and leather-cased lip balm, initials carved into daily objects seem to be making their biggest comeback since the trousseau. All of this seems natural in a context where vintage has now been considered cool for years, where the outdated has distinct and stable charm. The objects currently seen as tasteful then not only mimic the handmade, but also the old. It looks thrifted without dealing with the slowness of charity shop hunting; it is new without looking like it. In short, it allows for the comfort of fast fashion without having the appearance of it. Vulnerable chic looks vulnerable without being that at all: it is flawed and personalized in an infinitely reproducible and reproduced way. In a sense, it is deceitful – in a quirky, tender way.
I have now trained my algorithm away from gift recommendations, towards much more intellectual parts of TikTok (Poor Things discourse and room tours by antique-obsessed content creators). I have wondered why I fell for this aesthetic of vulnerability. I briefly believed this was mine, that in the end it was all my idea, my own tastes coincidentally revealed by dozens of micro-influencers. I might have fallen for the pathos of the wonky objects because of a deep-seated desire to be softer, somewhat lighter – and to create a downy home I get to rest in, full of small treasures that I’ve lovingly collected. The paradox, naturally, is that the joy of a personal style or a home that feels like one resides in the time, attention, and intention that was put into them: it cannot be turned into a commodity. In the best of all cases, one’s personal aesthetic inclinations are like the smell of a childhood home, unmistakably recognizable and completely indescribable. So, I think vulnerable chic is a scam: we know that what attracts us in the flawed is the humanity within and behind it. It cannot be manufactured on a large scale, it cannot be curated. What is reproduced here is childhood drawings on a fridge, grandma’s Swarovski swans and hand-knitted scarfs, bowls filled with coins and old, cheap jewelry gathering around a full house. It is life and familiarity that is sought here, as well as what’s left of softness in girlhood. Vulnerability chic, or whatever name you want to call it, shows our blatant lack, a fatigue of the impersonal and bare. There is a loneliness, too, in the large-scale reproduction of the handmade, in the curated gathering of daily objects, in the personal that isn’t at all. But there can be something to learn from it. It reveals a longing that can and should be brought to light: there is a fantasy to move towards, a place to rest in, an itch to scratch. I don’t think I should ignore that I find myself wanting the trinkets, that I feel tenderness for the purposely uneven patterns of a dress. I might take this as an opportunity to flee the polished. Tomorrow I will paint uneven stars on a card and send it off – I will embroider a crooked bird.
