Since then, the most viral parodies of VSCO girls have been by teenagers who could qualify as VSCO girls themselves, making it more of an exercise in self-deprecation than blatant misogyny (although there is plenty of that going on in other portrayals, too).īut what really turned the VSCO girl into a category of person worth explaining is TikTok, the short-form video app, which has become the defining social media network of Gen Z in the year since its US launch. In a video posted in August of her getting ready for the first day of sophomore year, she wears a basic T-shirt tucked into jean shorts, a choker, and messy bun tied up with a scrunchie, the sartorial underpinnings of VSCO girlhood. She’s making fun of them, of course, but Greer shares the same signifiers as the VSCO girls she’s parodying. Like “hipster,” “emo,” or “basic,” the term is both insult and apologia, something to use in reference to others or sheepishly about oneself. But ultimately, VSCO is a place to make your photos look good, and the stereotype goes that nobody cares more about making their photos look good than teenage girls. The app’s high-contrast, temperature-warped filters have the ability to make an average photo of a manicure or a cactus look profound, and though VSCO operates similar to a social network (there are profiles and “liking”), there’s far less pressure to curate a perfect-looking or algorithm-winning VSCO feed, since Instagram continues to operate as the public-facing social media self.
#Vsco backpack software#
That’s the aesthetic that permeates the actual app: VSCO, the photo-editing software that launched in 2012, operates like an Instagram draft folder. The look is at once expensive to achieve and laid-back in practice a teenager recently described VSCO girls to me as the type to spend 20 minutes making their messy buns look just so. The rest of her outfit will be composed of Birkenstock sandals (or any other ugly-trendy shoe, such as Crocs or Fila Disruptors), Burt’s Bees or Carmex lip balm topped with Glossier gloss, and a puka shell choker. She’ll carry a backpack by the Sweden-based Fjallraven and a sticker-covered Hydro Flask (cost per water bottle is around $35). If she’s not wearing a scrunchie in her hair, she’ll almost certainly keep one (or three) on her wrist, alongside a bracelet by the Costa Rica-founded brand Pura Vida. The “starter pack” of a VSCO girl will likely include the following items: A T-shirt so big that it covers the bottom of her shorts, which are maybe from Nike or the junior’s store Brandy Melville where everything comes in just one size (that size is “small”). The easy part is explaining what a VSCO girl is, which is most succinctly illustrated by the things she consumes.
You can get really thinky about what it means to be a VSCO girl on the Cut and who the VSCO-girl meme excludes on BuzzFeed.Ī post shared by Sydney Serena on at 11:24am PDT
#Vsco backpack how to#
You can find out how to transform yourself into a VSCO girl on Seventeen and Elle, and how much all of that costs in Fox Business. You can hear teens explain VSCO girls themselves in Slate.
What does feel novel is the feverishness of VSCO-girl-inspired content that has proliferated on the internet in 2019: You can read about what they are everywhere from the Charlotte Sun Herald to NBC News. Teenagers, particularly teenage girls, have long been the subject of fascination for adults, and the VSCO girl, whose name comes from the photo-editing app (pronunciation: “visco”) is only the latest iteration of how we express it. Months later, here we are in the thick of another meme cycle wherein high school subcultural dynamics are explored and consumed by people a decade or more removed from them. That wasn’t because I was particularly familiar with suburban high school fashion trends, but because it was a catchy nickname given to largely white and largely middle-class teenage girls, and those things always go viral. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I heard the term “VSCO girl” but I know it was on TikTok, and I was pretty sure that it would be a big deal.