We Need to Retire the Term Basic
This post started because of something very ridiculous and grew into this slightly feminist rant that it is right now. It started with a phone case, and the question of “if I get this will I be too basic?”. The phone case is pictured below, a Wildflower brand case, covered in butterflies. I am not one of those people who tend to be obsessed with butterfly prints or artwork, but the colors and the print this time just looked so happy and summery I instantly loved it! Since I have purchased from this brand before I knew it would protect my phone with no issue and they aren’t expensive. But fairly girly print and the kind of “basic” nature had me questioning if it was worth it. All over a PHONE CASE that was simply cute and I liked. So I sent a screenshot to my sister and asked her the above question. Her response? “Not if you love it”. This simple idea truly sent me into an existential crisis and I immediately bought the phone case. It will be here Thursday for those who are curious I am honestly very excited because look at it! It’s super cute! But I honestly realized my little sister had the right idea and honestly, as the oldest sister I just can’t let her be more evolved than me! (Just kidding!) (Mostly).
When I was in high school in a very tiny town, the term “basic” or “basic bitch” had a very strict meaning and there was a very strict type this applied to. It was a girl in high school, most likely blonde or dark hair with light highlights, pumpkin spice lattes, leggings or yoga pants or very skinny jeans, ugg boots, perfect nails, newest gadgets, and a hoodie/sweater that looked like one that everyone else had. I started high school in 2010, so this is a bit dated of an archetype, but it was easier to do then. I didn’t have a lot of social media in high school since Instagram came out in my sophomore year and Snapchat came out my junior year. Up until then, we had Facebook and then a little leftover Myspace, but nothing else was really super popular. There were not Instagram models/celebrities and making a career out of YouTube was a new thing. So we didn’t have a lot of other ideas of “basic” to compare to. We mainly used this idea of being “basic” to explain someone who did what everyone else did and had little to no individuality. By the time we had all hit senior year, however, this idea of “basic” had grown into the beginnings of what it is today which is really just anything too girly that our overall patriarchal society has deemed stupid. Yep, I told you it was about to get feminist.
See, as long as teen girls have existed, society has wanted to belittle them and make their interests invalid. For a while, liking anything mainstream at all was considered “basic”, but as I previously mentioned, it has evolved to a whole new beast. Describing the term“basic” is kind of like describing art or porn; you can’t really explain it but you know it when you see it right? But I am going to do my best, so let’s start with the idea of the VSCO Girl, shall we?
This happened recently and was a pretty big thing on Tik Tok as well as most other social media sites, and was mainly there to make fun of teen girls living their lives and posting it on social media. Like we were all doing. The VSCO Girl name (pronounced visco) is based on the popular photo editing app, VSCO. I use this app from time to time to edit photos because it is free, easy to use, and you can create your own custom filters to save for later use! It also acts as a social media site on a small scale because you can share the photos on the app that you edit in it. You cannot caption them or comment, so it is simply sharing photos, which is honestly a pretty cool idea. Because it is free and easy to use, teens gravitated towards it to edit their photos for VSCO and Instagram, but a trend started to take over of similar photo editing techniques, and some older college-age people as well as teen guys, started to notice a trend of girl that was posting these photos. A Vox writer explained the style best here: “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”). 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. She’ll carry a backpack by the Sweden-based Fjallraven and a sticker-covered Hydro Flask (cost per water bottle is around $35). 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. 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.” (Full article linked here).
It is honestly a fairly casual style and a lot of people who maybe don’t dress like that all the time, definitely fit into this category sometimes. I know I have. It is simply what was trending in 2019 and even still a bit today but the teen girls who were taking part in it were getting made fun of and being turned into a meme. But here’s the thing: it was simply trendy at the time (and still is) to dress this way and in these colors. I follow bloggers who also love tie-dye and bucket hats and wear oversized clothing. But since it was a trend started by teen girls we have to make fun of it. A VSCO Girl is basically just an offshoot of being basic which comes down to being someone who follows trends and enjoys the mainstream for whatever reason. But here we are to make fun of it.
Let’s look at teen boys real fast: they are some of the least individual group of people ever. If you walk into a high school, all the teen guys look the same. There are three or four haircuts, there are two or three different ways they dress, they all have the same two backpacks, and you can tell who is on a sports team together because they all look the exact same. But there’s no meme about them, and no one is writing articles or bashing them in the media for hoping onto trends and liking things that are too mainstream. We value the opinions of men and boys more in this society than we do those of girls and women. Teen boys can all look the same and this society just smiles and pats them on the back for it. But if a teen girl is not completely individualistic to herself, she is basic, she is a VSCO Girl and she is something to be made fun of.
We are all living by trends every day. Whether it’s larger mainstream trends or the more niche trends o your community, we all follow them. That’s what style is. We are informed about the things that we like based on the communities we are in and there is nothing wrong with that! We like what we like and if it is informed by what other people in our communities are doing that’s ok! If you like it and it is not hurting anyone else, there is nothing wrong with that even if it is trendy. Tie-dying things and wearing loungewear sets became trendy during Covid and as soon as things started to get more open memes started to pop up as well about how basic this all was. As far as I am concerned, the term basic, as well as any other term that trivializes what women like is over.
Madey
Cover art by Avery Lynch