I Want To Be A 60s Muse: Tumblr Idolization & Identities
on 2000s/2010s obsession with brilliant brunette beauties
Help girl! I can't stop talking about micro identities!!
Speaking the words “2014 Tumblr soft-grunge,” at least to me, always seems to evoke the same imagery. American Apparel plaid tennis skirts, AM by the Arctic Monkeys (bonus points if you’re wearing Knee Socks while listening), chokers, light wash denim, and of course, the icon (“It”Girl, if you will) of every, even vaguely, fashion-obsessed girl1: Alexa Chung.
Chung ruled the late-aughts and early 2010s. Her signature style, inspired by 60s muses starring alongside Serge Gainsbourg in French New-Wave films, struck a deep chord among anyone looking for that effortlessly high fashion, indie rockstar girlfriend vibe. Regarded (alongside Alex Turner) as “clever, talented, and cool,” TV presenter Sarah Cawood, on BBC 3’s Most Annoying Couples said:
“I want to be 21 years old, I want to be into Jean-Luc Godard films and be beautiful without any makeup on my face, and I want to be going out with the lead singer of one of the best bands in the last decade. That’s what I want, and they’ve got it, and that’s annoying.”
Now, I can’t say much from a lived-in experience of 2014, considering I was prancing around elementary school drawing anime girls in my sketchbooks, but Chung’s impact remains. With the revival of indie sleaze among other hyper-curated digital identities, the cultural prominence of Alexa Chung2, especially on sites like Tumblr, seems to be a precursor for the micro identities seen today.
As Rayne Fisher-Quann says in her essay standing on the shoulders of complex female characters:
it’s become very common for women online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of the things they consume, or aspire to consume — and because young women are conditioned to believe that their identities are defined almost entirely by their neuroses, these roundups of cultural trends and authors du jour often implicitly serve to chicly signal one’s mental illnesses to the public. one girl on your tiktok feed might be a self-described joan didion/eve babitz/marlboro reds/straight-cut levis/fleabag girl (this means she has depression). another will call herself a babydoll dress/sylvia plath/red scare/miu miu/lana del rey girl (eating disorder), or a green juice/claw clip/emma chamberlain/yoga mat/podcast girl (different eating disorder). the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would.
Yes, while the association with said micro identities shines through on TikTok the most3, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that Tumblr is TikTok’s big sister, it does have a “scrapbook-like ethos,” as Terry Nguyen puts it. Nguyen describes Tumblr as
“technically a social media site, though it functions more like a socially-driven thought network. Users aren’t pushed to prefer one form of content over another. Their feeds are also not as algorithmically driven, but curated by certain tags and accounts that users choose to follow.”
Before the TikTok coquette girls, there were Tumblr kawaii girls. Before your eating disorder green juice girls, there were the infamous pro-ana girls, who were even more forward about their intentions.
In a way, Chung was one of the first micro celebrities, with her curated, androgynous style or her sea salt sprayed waves. I don’t put the weight of pushing an individualistic-yet-conforming, glorification of waifish whatevers on her alone (maybe a little bit on Kate Moss and her damn quote though… if you know you know), because it’s not just her. These idolizations are teenage fantasies of course, but also a prime example of a systemic standard only being propelled through hyper-niche spaces.
Further Reading
TBH, most of these are just from the articles that I’ve already previously linked (whether in this piece or another), but they’re incredible for a reason!
Tumblr Girls, It Girls, and Girlbosses: The Evolution of the Influencer, sydney gore via wmagazine.com
Tumblr Poet Laureate, terry nguyen via dirt.fyi
Nostalgia in trends: The 2014 Tumblr aesthetic has returned, michael kearney via sbpress.com
TUMBLR EATING DISORDER CULTURE HAS MADE IT TO TIKTOK, laura picture via nylon.com
Reflections on a Starved Decade, charlie squire via evilfemale.blog
I could be 100% hallucinating this, but I swear in early Ashley bestdressed days she had a collage of Alexa Chung pictures as inspo… someone drop the link for me
re: effortlessly high fashion, indie rockstar girlfriend etc etc
re: “In the long term, seeing one’s appearance as a performance, of something one must conform to in order to seem “unique” and “niche” in the same way hundreds of others are being unique, is detrimental. Much of what you need to conform is in conventional beauty — that is, of course and again — very eurocentric. If you don’t follow their standards, to the superficial minds of the online, you’re uninteresting, you’re “normcore.” People are worried about that, being perceived as normal. They conflate it with not being special. A lot of discussions nowadays lack nuance, and few even care enough to dig deeper. They project how much they don't care about something beyond its surface onto their perceptions of others and themselves.”
- from my January essay on vanity sizing and micro labels