The elusive contours of one’s self

In June of this year, the British singer-songwriter Charli XCX, the pseudonym of Charlotte Emma Aitchison, released her sixth album through the New York-based Atlantic Records label. A single, short, slightly stretched word stood out on the acid-green cover: “brat,” four letters that we would soon come to know and recognize well. For days, the Internet was buzzing with the meaning of the controversial adjective: in the scorching summer of 2024, declaring oneself a “brat” would mean behaving and, above all, dressing like a bad girl, libertine and sassy, but in the proudest and most self-confident sense of the word.

After weeks of cheeky outfits marked by the #bratgirlsummer hashtag, TikTok turned to those left out with a more moderate trend. The word to know this time was “demure,” literally its opposite: reserved and modest, sometimes shy and introverted. Two opposing images and yet two sides of the same coin, summer 2024, which unlike what might have been the case in the past were not necessarily mutually exclusive but could coexist and engage in peaceful dialogue with each other.

While symbolic, brat and demure are just the latest in a long line of “cores” that have sprung up on social networks in recent years. Micro-trends that went viral for a few weeks before passing the baton to the next one, outdated before they even had time to make headlines. Do the terms cottagecore or barbiecore mean anything to you? Or even, more recently, corpcore or grandpacore? The former celebrated prairie dresses and an idealized country life, the latter Greta Gerwig’s cult film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling; the latter two, corporate-style office looks and a grandpa-cool vibe of cardigans, knit vests, corduroy pants, and loafers. And what about regencycore, which emerged in the wake of the Netflix TV series Bridgerton, and the old money style, which mimics the innate, timeless class of upper-class families and in turn kicked off the macro-trend of understated luxury?

And while this summer has also been all about medievalcore, dotted with corsets and metal fabrics inspired by medieval armor, the comeback has been greeted by the return of the goth style, an accomplice of Tim Burton’s sequel to Beetlejuice and its red carpets and heir to the recent gothic lolita, dark academia, and soft goth. Ever-new nouns for trends of sometimes questionable relevance, however, that testify to how fashion has adapted to the transience — or superficiality? — of the language of social media, to the point of challenging a consolidated industry that once produced two seasonal collections a year, and now finds itself creating countless thematic capsules to keep up with the increasingly erratic needs of consumers. Needs that translate into equally ephemeral trends: those who wake up brat today may fall asleep very demure tomorrow. And so on and so forth. If there is one thing that the season that has just ended has taught us, it is this: in 2024, it is no longer necessary to choose a single aesthetic interface with which to present yourself to the world, or even to it so well that you can embrace it. The important thing is to feel part of a trend, a global movement, whether for the duration of a post or an entire summer.

Fashion as a portal to portray one’s identity, has thus taken on new forms. Gone are the days when sporting a certain look meant being a spokesperson for a single ideology; having internalized, layering it over time, a certain wealth of references, beliefs, and values, to be defended to the teeth in political, social, moral, and musical outfits and postures, etc. However, the volatility of digital languages is not the only reason for this socio-cultural evolution. The mutability of customs has gone hand in hand with the realization of the fluidity of human nature itself. Today, we have accepted the prospect of being fluid people, with changing tastes and personalities, and fashion, as a mirror of society, merely reflects this. In a perfect syllogism, we could say that since people have always used clothing to express what they have inside, and since what they have inside has become fluid and changeable, their clothing will also take on the same characteristics of fluidity and discontinuity. 

However we choose to interpret it, fashion continues to be our most direct means of communication. Clothes, accessories, and the way we choose to present ourselves on a daily basis aesthetically are an eloquent language — just as eloquent as the spoken language — with which we can choose to tell the world who we are: what community we belong to, what music we listen to, what political values we hold, where we hang out, what jobs we do, and how we feel. And so much more. Before the rise of social media, the tribes one belonged to seemed well-defined: in a kind of ancestral ritual, one wore a certain T-shirt and a particular style of pants, a distinct makeup, and a specific haircut, to be recognized and to be found. Globalization and the abundance of input generated by social media have made this process more fluid and fragmented. On TikTok, the micro-trends, the so-called “cores,” are in constant flux, so that fashion is updated almost daily, leaving us at the mercy of events, but certainly freer than we have ever been. Free to define ourselves, but also to be many things: brat today, demure tomorrow, and the day after that, who knows. Ideology has given way to performance, and fashion, as the primary aesthetic interface, has offered itself as the means to bring it to the stage. Be it for a season or a dinner party.

“Clothing today is no longer a means of listing our identity as in a registry: it is an operating table that enables us to go where our anatomy cannot take us. It no longer has to affirm a gender, but allows bodies to traverse any gender and any identity,” wrote Alessandro Michele and Emanuele Coccia in their book La vita delle forme. Filosofia del reincanto, published this year by HarperCollins. In the book, which is bound like an old textbook, the fashion designer and current creative director of Valentino and the philosopher and professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris talk precisely about the forms of fashion as ways of understanding the world and oneself, as amulets with which to invent and experience new freedoms. According to the duo, fashion performs a kind of magic: each time we dress, we are transformed and can reveal something new about ourselves.

“Through clothes,” we continue to read between the pages structured as a dialog, “we don’t just decide our belonging: we make our existence something artificial, constructed, arbitrarily decided according to our most diverse needs.” As arbitrary the decision to embrace a particular style at the expense of another, whether to feel part of a global virtual movement or to manifest radical, individual belonging: “If you dress punk, you are punk without having to act, without having to say anything. It is a performative argument,” point out Coccia and Michele.

Fashion as an interface is thus, in essence, an endless form of self-representation, which today has taken on more tenuous but no less effective connotations: “To wear a dress is to enter a vehicle that takes our identity where we would not have been able to go with our anatomy alone.” Doesn’t this constant change risk leaving room for ambiguity? Michele replies, “Ambiguity is a state of grace. We all dream of cherishing and allowing unheard-of possibilities to live within us that allow us to diverge from ourselves.”