Is "Kinda Chic" Kinda Cringe? Everyone's Favourite Fashion Word Just Went Completely Out of Fashion

It's August, which means we're only halfway through the year. Nevertheless, I don't think we need to wait until December to confirm that the most annoying social media trend has already been awarded to the two little words that have been monopolising your feed and mine: "kinda chic".

On Instagram, this refers to a carousel where each photo is overlaid with text starting with "kinda chic to..." Examples of its usage range from the heartfelt—Reese Witherspoon's contribution started with, "kinda chic to be underestimated"—to the frankly rather niche ("kinda chic to know your barista by name," "kinda chic to order fries for the table," and, my personal favourite, "kinda chic to not dump ur lime bike").

It can't have started more than a few months ago—Witherspoon's post was as recent as 5 August—but the backlash quickly gathered pace; first with an inversion of the phrasing, "kinda not chic to...", before snowballing towards cringe with alarming speed. In short, kinda chic now has as much cachet as "Live, Laugh, Love". But while that trend at least had time to do a brisk trade in mugs and motivational coasters, kinda chic already has zero social currency. Coco Schiffer, a stylist based in New York, summarised the situation in six words on 2 August: "PSA: 'kinda chic' has been revoked". Cultural Memory, the newsletter written by Naomi May, hit my inbox this week with the subject line: "we must retire the adjective chic for the sake of humanity."

What's interesting—and equally what shows how trends now move at warp-speed—is that evidence suggests "chic" actually is falling out of favour. The Instagram account @databutmakeitfashion has reported that, "the word 'chic' is objectively losing its value". How they worked this out is by conducting a "sentimental analysis" on online articles mentioning the term. The results showed a clear downward trajectory to August (apparently "positive sentiment" has been dropping by 14% a month since March).

This feels like a fairly drastic reaction to a social media trend that went viral then went viral again (for the wrong reasons)—and is especially interesting because it's not "finger shoes" (which, for the record, have grown on me!) or a polarising item of clothing. This time, we're talking about a word.

I actually wrote my own newsletter about breaking up with the adjective earlier this month, for different reasons than "kinda chic", which was on my radar but obviously not irking me enough to include. It turns out one of my favourite writers, Hanya Yanagihara, banned the word from being used when she first joined as editor-in-chief of T Magazine. It's also the fact that it falls down on precision.

As I wrote in that post, "You see it deployed perhaps not interchangeably but in a similar context to words such as ‘elegant’, ‘put-together’ and even ‘minimal’, but while those can all be summarised more straightforwardly—put-together, for example, means someone who takes care of their appearance in a way that’s not just presentable but precise (that word again!)—chic is more of an umbrella term for all of the above, pretending at specificity and yet eluding a clear meaning other than something generally positive and grown-up."

I guess this is partly why it worked as a trend—for a (very) short while. It's a word that was able to be co-opted; your manicure could be chic but so could the way you parked your car or buttered your toast. Maybe, however, it's nothing to do with the word's lack of meaning, and more to do with how getting a bit rage-y online will always drive engagement. Anastasia Vartanian, whose online alter-ego is @fatannawintour, just posted a newsletter with an intriguing headline on her Substack, Cultural Cyberbully: "Everyone has to be annoying these days." It's about the cycle of despising people's "inane" captions and fluffy-mic videos and "algorithmically-mandated" hot takes, but then also realising that all of these things are a part and parcel of what it means to work in media right now. "After all, I’m also in the business of siphoning attention and turning it into money," is how she ends her introduction.

There is a solution to not getting dragged into a trend (and then dragged for participating in said trend). Vartanian is rebuilding her algorithm from the ground up. "Low cortisol content at its finest: no internet discourse, trends or formats, just vibes. People filming a video like they have no idea what a hook, a microtrend, a ring light or an affiliate link is. But that’s exactly the appeal." Now all you have to do is resist the urge to call that advice, "kinda chic".