You can’t just buy your way into being ‘chic’, actually
There comes a time, for most people, when we are bored of ourselves. We then look inward for a mental spring cleaning, necessitating questions of the self. Who are you, how do you live inside your body and what does it mean to enjoy yourself without seeking approval? There was a moment in time when body positivity was a popular answer; this, the age of GLP-1s, is not that time. If thousands of Instagram talking-heads and Substack listicles are any indication, it would appear that being chic is the self-actualisation mantra of the moment. While writing this, I came across a viral reel listing “Cool girl brands but unique chic and slow fashion”. The fashion podcast Nymphet Alumni spent hours decoding “shabby chic”, “succubus chic” et cetera—and now offers strategies to free yourself from the “tyranny of chicness”. How did we get here?
French philosopher Roland Barthes regarded the construct to be deliberately out of reach. It allowed the “fashion system”, as he put it, to keep generating desire (and demand) for itself. One was never meant to know if one is chic, which was the point.
Except now, it is no longer an elusive quality. You can know it. Moreover, you can buy it. Carrie Bradshaw capris. Ottessa Moshfegh’s books, also spotted in the hands of It girls like Rachel Sennott and Julia Fox. Minimalist fits make you feel as glamorous as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Carey Mulligan wore Cord on the second season of Beef; maybe you should shop from desi designers to set yourself apart from logo-chasers. Sustainability is chic too, and here are five homegrown slow-fashion brands you should invest in.
It doesn’t matter whether the products themselves appeal to your taste. By aligning with these totems of chicness, you signal that you are in the know, embody a zeitgeisty yet ironic affect. Your complex interiority is meant to outwardly sparkle with the help of whatever you put on yourself, which necessarily has to have cultural relevance. Individual style is beginning to unironically look something like this: The off-duty model look, which is no longer the preserve of models, with that white tee (The Row), those books (from Dua Lipa’s reading lists), the cups (Stanley) and the shoulder bags (Miu Miu). Couture being unaffordable isn’t an excuse, I can always thrift a pair of
Alaïa ballet flats. We may never own a home, but we must know what Bauhaus architecture is. I had only just caught up with art deco and the Chandigarh chair before these became passé. Late-stage capitalism demands that to be chic today, I must acquire personality and cultural fluency the good old-fashioned way: buying luxury products according to what the algorithm defines as taste, a secret handshake for others like me.
