Girls, I think, existed before the internet. Louisa May Alcott called them “Little Women” and 18th-century painters depicted them as elderly children. The ’80s had the geriatric Golden Girls and the ’90s had the 20-year-old Spice Girls, which is to say: some of our most famous “girls” were never girls at all. These were women who decided – with all their adult knowledge – to revisit the camaraderie of girlhood. Because a girl is never a woman, but a woman can, of course, be both.
And over the past 12 months, it feels like a similar sense of yearning has permeated culture. There was the resurgence of Barbie as a popular protagonist; there were Taylor Swift friendship bracelets; there was a Sofia Coppola film; and there was the rise of Sandy Liang and all her bow-festooned designs, dovetailing with a mainstreaming of school shoes and the omnipresence of TikTok’s girl trends. Here is a non-exhaustive list of those trends: Vanilla Girls and Rat Girls, Girl Math and Girl Dinners, Tomato Girl Summers and Babygirls, Lalala Girls and OKOKOK Girl