Nov 4, 2019 11:04 AM

VSCO Girls Are Just Banal Victorian Archetypes

The VSCO girls who rise to the top of my feed are a new version of an enduring image of piousness and demureness as the ultimate ambition.

a young cool girl wearing 90s style sunglasses a sweetshirt and a bubble gum bubble

In 2010, washed-out images of skinny and ethereal white women became the internet’s newest favorite aesthetic. On Tumblr, the platform du jour, there were photos of women, shoeless, in fields of flowers pouting lazily at the camera; women standing at windows in their underwear looking dreamily out onto a European street; there was even one photo making the rounds of a delicate, pale young woman in a white nightgown standing knee deep in Hurricane Sandy flood water. The photography app Hipstamatic, a gritty-filter precursor to Instagram, had 4 million downloads by 2012, and its style was infiltrating the Tumblr feeds of every woman with an account.

In 2011, I created a Tumblr to make fun of the explosion of these filtered fantasy women. It was called Carefree White Girl, a (then) subversive sendup. The photos I made fun of fell into the category of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but because they were stills or GIFs, I could create an accompanying narrative all my own. I’d take those widely shared photographs and beneath them I’d write comedic tales of girls on study abroad or last-minute cross-country road trips and stories about nymphs posing naked in the forest to “commune” with nature without the hassle of clothes. I made a song called Carefree White Girl with a friend in her basement in Bushwick; it was about a Carefree White Girl who lives in Bushwick and dates a guy who looks like Devendra Banhart. I gave a talk to a room full of students at Connecticut College and did a couple radio interviews wherein I described the cultural relevance of the Carefree White Girl.

After a few months, Carefree White Girl had accrued thousands of followers. I let people submit photos and I’d write the accompanying story. (The site was deleted by the platform a year or so ago after I neglected it for too long. Oops.) What was so fascinating to me was how rote the experience of writing was, how easily the stories came. And, in return, how my followers understood exactly the references I was making. Carefree White Girl was, after all, just a new twist on an old archetype. There were other similar satires. White Girl Problems, a popular Twitter account started around the same time as my Tumblr, and “Shit Girls Say,” with its necessary follow up “Shit white girls say to black girls.”

It’s been a long time since 2011. Hipstamatic was overtaken by Instagram. Facebook is dead. And now meme-making teens are flooding to the video and lip syncing app TikTok. Two months ago, an old Carefree White Girl reader tweeted a link at me with this message “Carefree White Girl Has a New Name”: the VSCO girl.

But the basic premise remains the same. No one claimed to be a Carefree White Girl but everyone knew what one was. Et tu, VSCO girl.

In the 19th and early 20th century, values such as purity, domesticity, piety, and submissiveness—which later came to be called the “Cult of Domesticity”—dominated Western thinking about women. Advertisements geared at women promoted these values. One of America’s first blockbuster films, Birth of a Nation, ends with the capture of a “mulatto” carpetbagger who had tried (and failed) to force a pious and virginal white woman into marrying him.

There were, of course, foils. Take, for example, Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The family has no money , and the women have to work. Jo dresses like a boy and is harsh, but in the end, she, too, becomes something of a paradigm of goodness and piety, a model family woman.

The Cult of Domesticity is still plainly there in the videos of VSCO girls and even in the modern TikTok foil, E-girls.

VSCO girls—the term comes from a photo app that makes them look dreamy—dress in oversized sweatshirts that reveal lean and muscular legs, their feet adorned in colorful Birkenstocks or Crocs. They’ve got long hair and sunkissed SoCal skin and carry Hydro Flask bottles and metal straws to virtue signal their environmentally conscious ethos. Virtue signaling is so Cult of Domesticity. They mist themselves with bottles of Mario Badescu and keep their skin protected with Sun Bum (both come in plastic bottles, errr). Teen Vogue helpfully suggested the proper scrunchies and Kanken backpack for a VSCO girl starter pack, if you’re interested. E-Girls, that dark counterpart to and the tortured foil of VSCO girls, evokes Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club with an updated anime flare. But unlike Jo, or Ally Sheedy, the E-girl is often found looking at the camera like a dark and lost little lamb in heavy eye makeup that needs saving.

Luckily, the good young people of TikTok provide some comedic relief, a la Carefree White Girl. When I take a gander through the app’s VSCO girl and E-girl hashtags, a user known as @danicabrackett pops onto my feed wearing an oversized sweatshirt and shorts. She stands in front of a bathroom mirror, the phone’s camera bounces her reflection back to us and just then she flashes the camera a big smile. She cocks her head to the side abruptly, her ponytail jumps.

“Hi!” says @danicabrackett “I’m jumping into your Tik Tok feed just to say that I’ve seen people get big on TikTok for being a VSCO girl and for being an E-girl.” She continues, her voice and body language exuding a youthful exuberance. “So, if I put both of those aesthetics in one video, would I be, like, huge?” Scene change. @danicabrackett stands before us in a different (but similar) oversized sweatshirt, this one is blue. There are three scrunchies—light blue, dark blue, and pink—on her wrist, she’s sipping water out of a reusable Starbucks cup. “Hi guys I’m a VSCO girl,” she says with a sunny inflection. “I have my water Birks on just in case I need to get out in the rain and help a turtle across the street.” Second scene change. @danicabrackett is now wearing a black cropped shirt and black pants, with a lime green wool hat on her head and an oversized denim jacket. Most striking are the two black dots she’s painted under her eyes. She stands in front of the mirror prodding at her face and rolling her eyes in the back of her head.

A TikTok search of #vscogirl and #egirl yields tons of parodies like @daniabrackett’s, a hallmark of what happens when an internet fad has reached critical mass.

Both are a form of internet theater, a new category we can add to other cultural mediums (like film, music, plays, and books). TikTok identities pull from an amalgam of subcultures in the physical world but live primarily online—you won’t see a concert of devoted e-girls watching an e-girl songstress belt out a ballad. Her lime-green makeup and heavy black eyeliner that signals ’90s punk is manufactured for social media. A VSCO girl may carry an environmentally safe water bottle but there is little evidence she “saves the turtles.” The socio-political and cultural touchstones inspiring their looks are for the most part aesthetic, just like those images from way back in 2011 on Tumblr. On the whole, TikTok feels reflective of current youth culture—one that is constantly bending beyond rigid boundaries of gender and sexuality—but these two identities feel retrograde. Et tu, Carefree White Girl.

Egirls seem cutting edge and VSCO girls like modern-day hippie nature lover, but they reify the old standards of beauty: milky white skin, thin frames, long straight hair. The photo filters make their skin look smooth and celestial. To me, their attitudes don’t feel too far from turn-of-the-century attitudes toward white womanhood.

The VSCO girls and E-girls who rise to the top of my feed are a new version of an enduring yet impossibly banal image of the Cult of Domesticy: that piousness and demureness are the ultimate ambition. Thanks to @DaniaBrackett and the league of TikTok jokesters revealing the truth behind these archetypes: that they don’t exist.