(blank) girl summer 'for breakfast'
now that summer’s over over, let’s do a retrospective on all the girl summer trends that have come and gone - summer 'for breakfast' 2024 pt. 3
One of the beauties (or horrors) of Substack is that you’ll toy with an idea for a few days or weeks, and then, all at once, you’ll get three or four well-crafted pieces straight to your inbox fleshing out that idea better than you ever could.
This summer, I was thinking about the economy of boys. A lot. If anything, seeing several writers I admire beat me to the punch made me feel less crazy about what I’d been observing over the past year.
Boys are back. Boy rooms. Boy smells. Boyfriends — good ones and shitty ones.
talks boys and the beauty industry in her piece, “Boyhood is trending.” points out how “On Tiktok every trend is just the patriarchy” in “Boyfriendland.”
If boys are back, why then, may I ask, is there no boy summer? With the little distance we have from brat girl summer, now a brat girl autumn, I’d like to explore the past three girlhood summer trends and see how they coincide with girlhood now being [OFF-TREND].
for breakfast: 2019’s hot girl summer
Hot Girl Summer became synonymous with Megan Thee Stallion, but I can conjure up a few memories of the phrase gaining some traction in viral tweets, Instagram captions, and short-form videos about how to achieve a glow-up before your hot girl summer.
2019 was the last summer pre-COVID-1,9 and hot girl summer in retrospect seems like a preemptive response to pandemic isolation. At the same time, there is something distinctly girlbossy and choice feminist about it. Go outside! Be single! Have a roster! Engage in “hoe activities”! Be hot! Have sex! Be hot! Have sex!
Looking back on what led to summer 2023 being declared “the year of the girl,” trends like hot girl summer were part of that pendulum swing towards women, where it was about time publicly aiming for being prettier than everyone else stopped being taboo. We are a far cry from 2019.
for lunch: 2023’s rat girl summer
Flash forward a pandemic, an election, and a hegemonic social media platform, and that brings us to 2023: rat girl summer. Maybe my favorite of the girl summer trends and the least well-known, rat girl summer was coined by fellow Substack writer Lola Kolade.
From “It’s Rat Girl Summer. Grab a snack.”:
The 29-year-old trendsetter’s four rules for Rat Girl Summer:
Spend most of your time out of your home (she allows two days a week to “decay” and scroll social media in bed).
Eat enjoyable and nourishing food that gives you energy to “cause mayhem.”
Let yourself be ruled by whimsy rather than embarrassment.
And most importantly, don’t overthink. If rats don’t think twice before stealing a slice of pizza and escaping across the subway platform, Kolade asks, why should Rat Girls?
In a way, rat girl summer is the logical backslide of hot girl summer. Devoid of men or clear goals or concerted effort towards your public appearance. Rat girl summer provided simple guidelines for a generation who still finds it hard to get out of bed and brush their teeth.
Rat girl summer barely left TikTok circles, but I think it set the stage for girlhood being ON-trend in the year to come. If hot girl summer is selling you sexual freedom, rat girl summer is selling you trash, mess, and your peace of mind. I was definitely buying.
for dinner: 2024’s brat girl summer
The etymological evolution of rat girl summer to brat girl summer is too interesting not to point out. Somewhere between rat girl summer and brat girl summer, the trend of girlhood soured and died.1 The summer of 2023 was so saturated with girl that its girl summer almost required no modifier before it.
The b in brat comes from club as in club rat and if you need more Charli xcx “lore,”2 I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding it. Brat girl summer is tongue-in-cheek, it’s “transgressive,” it’s messy, and impulsive. It’s [OFF-TREND] on purpose, so they say. This time I don’t buy it. Actually, I couldn’t buy it if I tried.
Unlike its ratty predecessor that I found quite energetic and soulful, brat girl summer - not brat the album, not Charli xcx the artist - is about as soulless as summer trends get. It’s elusive and prickly. It’s maybe a bit cold. You see it through your screen and you hear about the concept, the feeling of brat, but if even you do feel it you question if you actually do.
[Here’s some great commentary about how, just like indie sleaze, brat summer is not achievable or real in 2024 without a good amount of capital.]
To answer my original question: why is there no boy summer? There are no boy summer trends because boys are always on trend even when we think they aren’t! Trends sell you in-and-out, come-and-go, and boys don’t leave. Girls get woman’d3 all the time, and then the trends try to get you to buy low and sell high.
As we try to commodify girl fall and autumn, over the next few miserable months and years we’ll just have to wait and see how girlhood gets sold next.
As for the (blank) girl summer trend industrial complex, it has either peaked or collapsed — only summer 2025 will tell.
Oh! And one more thing, today’s featured song of the summer goes to:
Personally, I blame the introduction of “girl hobbies”! I’ve never seen the tide turn so quickly on an innocent trend participant.
Lore, another word that has lost all meaning in the past few years.
still processing this piece !
hey ! i’m not too shy