the irony in whimsy girl summer
A trend that contradicts itself and a plot that has been officially lost.
If you have been reading girl online for a while, you already know my standard advice for any internet microtrend that commodifies the performance of girlhood — practice mindfulness, actively explore life outside algorithmic conformity, and embrace the chaos that can only be brought forth by being your true, authentic self.
That’s what I told you when we discussed looksmaxxing. That’s what I told you when we discussed the girl moss. And that’s what I told you when we discussed tag-for-hire services. But what if a microtrend comes up asking you to do the very same thing I have been telling you — just with a checklist of everything you need to do and a moodboard to emulate while you are at it.
Welcome to whimsymaxxing.
When I first came across videos of women online reiterating the importance of being whimsical, I was overjoyed. They were stopping to smell the flowers and going mushroom picking in the woods. It was also around that time that I was getting bored with my marketing job in a tech company. I was feeling uninspired, and working over 10 hours a day talking about AI-assisted shopping wasn’t creatively fulfilling. So you can only imagine how I wanted to be like the girls embracing whimsy and the unorganised parts of everyday life.
But my joy did not last long. From one-off videos of girls trying to escape the mundanity of modern life with a little colour here and a speck of glitter there, to a 20-something standing in a soulless beige living room selling me a list of pieces I need to buy to build a whimsical wardrobe, whimsymaxxing has grown into a mammoth and is now threatening us with the most contradictory trend ever — whimsy girl summer.
P.S: We are not even going to get into the obvious grammatical error in that phrase. It should be whimsical girl summer, but that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like whimsy girl summer.
What is most jarring for me is the speed with which the algorithm took a loophole we found to experience genuine human joy amidst the lack of pizzaz in our daily lives and turned it into yet another trend. Now one might argue that it is just how short-form video platforms that exclusively exist for advertisement revenue function. And I would agree with them. As I explained in a previous issue titled “what’s your core?”, algorithms are highly efficient in converting deep, human desires into rigid, searchable taxonomy.
The girls craving for higher education, classical literature, and spending time with the arts in a world that gate-keeps liberal arts education gets served up dark academia. The girls craving for a slow, rich life in the country in a culture that romanticises working to death can just cosplay cottagecore. The girls tired of the divine feminine and tradwives, who want to be seen as tough, while still being fashionably feminine, and taken care of by an imaginary man, are the mob-wives.
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To understand whimsy girl summer, we need to understand the summers before her.
The clean girl summer of ‘22 was essentially a military routine optimised for our collective need to unwind from the post-pandemic burnout. But soon enough, we also got exhausted with perfecting our morning matcha lattes, slicking back our hair, and attending pilates. Enter the rat girl summer of ‘23.
A 2023 report by Autostraddle explains the rat girl as:
You commit yourself to spending five days of the week scurrying around the city, eating snacks, and doing things you have no business doing. That last piece is the most important. Then, you devote two days to crawling up into your bed and rotting away. One could argue this just looks like a normal work week where you spend five days grinding and two of them sleeping your worries away. The difference here is in the level of mischievousness and curiosity you should embody in those five days.
Once we relaxed as the rat girls for a bit, we were ready to live again. So then came the brat girl.
Brat summer of 2024 started as a messy, unapologetic celebration of hedonism and raw authenticity. But within weeks, we went from club-culture rebellion to try-hard lime-green billboards outside supermarkets. 2025 was the summer of nothing. So we must have finally realised the futility of trying to make “culture happen” every summer. But I guess not.
From a media culture lens, brat summer is highly significant. It was towards the hyper-commercialised end of brat summer that the trend cycle fatigue finally hit us all. It was then that many of us started embracing the girl moss. Being a girl moss was all about “practising a lifestyle centred around holistic well-being over glorified and oversimplified metrics of success, prioritising presence over productivity, and being ready to be absorbed back into nature.”
This sort of exhaustion is precisely where being whimsical comes in. Between our 12-step routine to achieve glass skin, capsule wardrobes based on our colour theory seasons, pilates 6x a week to get toned arms like Miley Cyrus, and portfolio careers that provide multiple streams of income amidst looming economic uncertainty, we are tired.
Actually, tired is the wrong word. Our souls are exhausted. We just want to exist. We long for a world that wasn’t so hyper-optimised, that didn’t “protect our boundaries radically,” and placed our worth on the “value” we produce. The lazy girl trend, cottage core, coastal grandmothers, fairy core, and now whimsy girl summer; all come from this one fundamental desire.
But despite looking like a harmless trend about living an intentional, slow life, I can’t accept whimsymaxxing with open arms like I have many other previous slow living trends. Let me explain. To be whimsical means to simply act on your whims. The Merriam-Webster dictionary explains whim as ”a capricious or eccentric and often sudden idea or turn of the mind.”
In her essay “Reject Modernity, Embrace Dilly-Dallying: The Birth of the Whimsy Girl,” published by the Institute of Network Cultures, scholar Helena Lomnicka explains whimsy as :
… a vibe, an attitude, an aesthetic and a life-philosophy — one that prioritizes a frivolous orientation toward reality, amplifying a sense of wonder and child-like curiosity in relation to one’s surroundings. What the vibe of whimsy is chasing is the feeling you get after a whole day having a picnic in the sun, eating fruit and laughing with friends. The feeling of lightness and a fullness all at once, a fuzzy warmth that cannot be bought or subscribed to, that can only arise organically — in between circumstances, places and people — the little switch-moment in your brain that, after days of overpowering depressive thoughts, reminds you that life can still be quite freaking beautiful.
According to me, whimsy is more than just buying more stickers, badges, colourful socks, hairpins, and edible glitter. It is the spontaneous decision to put googly eyes on your stapler or to blow soap bubbles in the shower. It is, by definition, an un-monetizable waste of time. To be whimsical is to not have a plan. It is the very opposite of optimising everything. Yet, whimsy girl summer asks us to efficiently schedule our inefficiency.
Being whimsical is an internal state of wonder that relies entirely on you being completely absorbed in the world around you. When you start following a checklist on how to eccentric-out your life, it ceases to be an internal state of being. And before you know it, your deep desire for whimsy, that is, the desire to simply exist in the nightmare that is late-stage capitalism, also gets commodified. And that is the irony of whimsy girl summer.
In conclusion, my issue with this trend is not the desire or the values it perpetuates. To want to be more whimsical is to want to be free and feel more joy in every life. And that is exactly what I want for every woman around me. To be honest, that is who you and I should aim to be — a whimsical woman who doesn’t accept the pressures and judgements of patriarchy and nurtures her inner child radically. And that is why I say that whimsy girl summer has no real whimsy.
Whimsy doesn’t exist in a moodboard. Whimsy is the joy from mixing fabrics and textures that no one would dare to place together on a moodboard. Whimsy doesn’t come with a checklist. It comes from throwing the checklist in the trash and wandering through life and chasing experiences that call out to your soul. True whimsy is freedom, and freedom doesn’t come from conforming to the “trend of the year” or falling prey to the algorithmic gods who exist solely to get you to make purchases from someone’s Amazon storefront.
So yes, go be your most whimsical self, but for the love of all things whimsical, don’t cosplay whimsy this summer.