How Girly Intellectualism Took Over Fashion
Words: Arianna Caserta
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On the contemporary internet landscape, extreme girlyness and intellectualism seem to go hand in hand: the popularity of Dark Academia and its intense fetishisation of classic culture and highbrow literature gave life to hundreds of intellectual-inspired outfit guides, converting — for the first time on TikTok — the interest in what is considered "high culture” in a Pret-A-Porter way of dressing.
Once the distinctions between virtual intellectuals circles and apparel were blurred, #BookTok found its perfect archetype. Incorporating themes of womanhood, female rage and romantic sadness, the Hot Girl Book Aesthetic describes the kind of book shelf that an IT girl — that kind of micro celebrity who could spawn directly out of the underground scene of a big city, a la Party Girl — would have in her perfectly decorated flat.
The Virgin Suicides is her favorite movie and My Year of Rest and Relaxation her favorite book. Embedded in a feedback loop progressively less and less open to changes, these cultural symbols became a widely spread sensation: a way of blending into a code of representation, a pre-made personality to introduce one's identity to the world. But how does one prove belonging to the Hot Girl Book Squad even in absence of the selected fetishised objects, like actual books or films?
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Within the past year, the ever-influent brand O’Mighty introduced its Freud skirt — using “is my velvet freudian slip skirt appropriate for vday?” as a catchphrase — while Moonkissed Collective trademarked its “Written by Ottessa Moshfegh” printed shirts and Conventional Projects launched its Karl Marx-Strasse-Velour Tracksuit, with the philosopher’s name written in small shiny rhinestones. But where does the impulse to wear cultural references by turning them into symbols come from and how does this tendency marry our current times?
Conceived as another dimension allowing one to rewrite its own rules from scratch, the Internet has accentuated the human need for self-representation, the urge to ultra-narrativise every event in one's life — see also, Main Character Syndrome — in order to meticulously choose the self-image one desires to put on stage. This way, building of our online personas does not really differ much from the world building dynamics of a film, a novel or a video game, and an everyday occurrence can become kafkaesque or freudian in our daily language.
“The Internet has accentuated the human need for self-representation, the urge to ultra-narrativise every event in one's life.”
Film critic Laura Mulvey described this same urge in 2006, when she first started observing the shared need among film lovers to possess their favourite scenes way beyond the movie theatre. In the essay The Possessive Spectator, part of her book Death 24x a Second, she writes, “The film industry produced, from the very earliest moments of fandom, a panoply of still images that could supplement the movie itself. All these secondary images are designed to give the film fan the illusion of possession, making a bridge between the irretrievable spectacle and the individual’s imagination.” What Mulvey underlines is the following: taking away a segment of the beloved media away from its original context, one can manage to adapt it and use it for its personal storytelling means.
Has #BookTok stolen from cinema’s extreme relatability to give literature and philosophy - slow arts which differ so much from the ultra-rapid contemporary ways of consuming media - its own visual language and place in contemporary fashion culture? Was the term lynchian the direct antecedent of the term kafkaesque? And how did French philosopher Gilles Deleuze end up on a nude-tinted corset in the same way a Quentin Tarantino film poster or a Metallica album cover appeared on t-shirts during the 1990s?
What the Hot Girl Book Aesthetic really promotes is a “feminine” way of approaching academic culture, an area generally — and improperly — regarded as mostly appealing only to male audiences. Most of all, #BookTok and the rising popularity of the “intellectual e-girl archetype” recall the popularity that the Art Hoe Aesthetic grew around 2014, when a new way of dressing spread out of the intense admiration towards selected artists: Those of the 1900s — especially Impressionists or Expressionists — and those further back in time with replications of angelic motifs of religious paintings on crop tops and iPhone cases.
The Art Hoe Aesthetic, just like the Hot Girl of Booktok, found pleasure in creating its own icons and idols: artists, like Van Gogh or Matisse or Kahlo, now turned into pop stars thanks to the extreme iterations of their paintings on Tumblr blogs and WeHeartIt boards. Drawing a parallel between the two phenomenons, it’s arguable that Boston-born writer Ottessa Moshfegh is in fact today’s Vincent Van Gogh? And that the darkly feminine and decadent world she built with her novels My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Eileen perfectly replaces the primary-colour-palettes and sunflower-y world of a 2014 Art Hoe? On TikTok, Moshfegh is the Nirvana band tee of the 2010s. She’s a star: her name is one you cannot escape from. “Moshfegh is Freud, but for hot people” declares TikTok account @the.hot.girl.reading.list, suggesting how she’s fully committed to “retiring ‘Freudian’ and describing things as Moshfeghian”.
Moshfeghmania is a result of how TikTok’s algorithm isolates its users in echo chambers based on repetitive content and recommendations. Both #BookTok and Bookstagram are littered with the same authors and titles over and over, prioritising the display of one’s shared interests instead of actually supporting new discoveries. When a product appears looking just like it was perfectly tailored for your tastes, it’s probably because it is. When you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you. And the desire to add the Ottessa tank top into your basket is the way that companies have to profit off our pleasure of feeling like we’re unique individuals: you think you’ve found your niche, but it is more like the niche has found you.