Consumability and the Truth of the “It Girls”

What the hell is a garlic girl? 

One of the infinite consequences of TikTok, “garlic girl” is a new self-proclaimed title for girls who like to cook with garlic. I, admittedly, am a garlic girl. 

The birth of the label, however, is not unprecedented. It follows a newer trend of identifying yourself as one of many niches of girls. If you’re online, you’ve seen “clean girl makeup,” or women castigating each other for being desperate “pick-me girls” while upholding themselves as self-possessed “girl’s girls.” Everybody everywhere wants to be an iconic “It Girl.” There’s been a shift online from young people simply enjoying things to cultivating a personality based on consumption. 

For example, in August of 2022, a popular trend consisted of girls proudly announcing themselves as their partner’s first girlfriend who uses different materialistic products. They flaunted goods such as fake tans, extensive skin care, and frequent new nails or hair appointments. Women exhibited their consumerism online as their identity, and framed it in a way that uplifted self-described “expensive” women. However, instead of encouraging women to honestly appreciate luxurious goods, trends like this seduce women into subverting their identities and contorting their personalities into a single niche. In many of these identity niches, personal definition and presentation is based on consumption of mass-market goods and services. 

In other words, what makes us consumable is our consumption. 

Even in videos containing simple labels, like “garlic girl,” there are identities being sold. Videos in this subgenre include time-consuming recipes delivered on beautiful dishware in expensive kitchens. With these associations of materialism comes a sense of individuality. There’s a feeling of uniqueness and superiority in this alluring escape from a lack of flavor, which is really an escape from being bland and boring. If you’re a garlic girl, you’re exciting and different. You’re unique.

Each of these niche identities that women take on present them as novel and somehow better than the last viral type of girl. Weeks after the minimalist “clean girl” aesthetic inundated our algorithms, the retaliation of the messy, un-put-together “dirty girl” rose to the surface, and promoted itself as more real and authentic than its predecessor.

Writer Rayne Fisher-Quann comments on the online desire for individuality through the lens of capitalism in her article “Micro-Individuality.” She writes that a capitalist economy promotes products “distinct enough to be sold, but not so distinct that it veers away from consumer demand.” This economic tenant has become just as significant as a cultural guideline. We try to sell ourselves as these types of objects too. “In this kind of ecosystem,” Fisher-Quann writes, “uniqueness is a kind of commodity.” In order to sell new personality after new personality, we seek to be more extraordinary than the last trend, but not so unusual that we can’t be understood. 

These online commodified identity niches allow us to separate ourselves from the masses, but still remain understandable, and above all else, consumable. 

This “consumability is king” mindset is the product of hypermodernism, and the hyperconsumerism it created in turn. Hyperconsumerism is the replacement of consuming to an end, such as staying fed or living comfortably, by consuming as an end goal. Instead of creating a comfortable life by buying baseline goods, luxurious goods have become the epitome of perceived comfortability. “I work to buy myself pretty things,” while a true testament even for myself, is hyperconsumerism in a nutshell. 

These identity niches promote the idea that consuming pretty things in a predictable pattern makes you yourself a pretty thing. 

So, what’s the truth of the It Girls? They’re false idols fueled by the desire to consume. They’re caricatures meant to uphold damaging ideals of superiority, wealth and desirability. They’re simply the best marketing strategy we’ve seen for products in decades.

However, you are a human person, not a product. You don’t need to be consumable. You aren’t required by the masses to fit into one single category. You’re allowed to break your nonexistent mold. You’re allowed to be a “clean girl” one day and wear three-day-old flannel pajamas to 7-11 that very night. 

You don’t have a brand to uphold. You simply have a life to live.