As trees bloom, the predictions come on like
an allergy attack.
The song of the summer will be by Ed Sheeran.
The drink of the summer will be the Hugo Spritz. Feral Girl Summer is over and
Married Girl Summer has arrived. Get out your toenail clippers, because
Barefoot-Boy Summer is on its way.
اضافة اعلان
Summer is coming, and with it the yearly
onslaught of attempts to label a season that has not yet happened.
Media outlets one-up one another’s outrageous
guesses, and influencers compose mood boards for their followers to emulate.
Themes pile up on social media, where almost no activity is safe from being
named a seasonal microtrend. Just lounging outdoors in a lightweight dress?
Welcome to your Amy March Girl Summer.
Many of these declarations are not meant to be
taken seriously, and plenty will not succeed (see: Hot Vax Summer and, less
consequentially, The New York Times’ endorsement of the Dirty Shirley). But all
arise from a desire to identify some distinct flavor of each summer that can be
captured and stored like strawberry preserves.
“No summer ever came back, and no two summers
ever were alike,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, who died 155 years before he would
have been able to listen to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer”.
Winter always gets to be winter. The pumpkin
spice latte is barely tweaked from one fall to the next. So why do we subject
summer to this premature, and perhaps futile, exercise in branding?
Adjective, noun, season
For one, there’s the tantalizing possibility
of getting it right.
“I don’t think you could think about summer
without thinking about ‘Hot Girl Summer,’” Megan Thee Stallion told The New
York Times Magazine in 2020. The rapper, who had released the song in August
2019, conveyed a message of self-assurance with flaming album art and a kinetic
beat.
The song captured, and perhaps influenced, the
feeling of the late days of that summer, said Charlie Harding, a host of the
music podcast “Switched on Pop.” “So many people took up that moniker of
feeling hot and feeling good,” he said.
Its title was a handy three-word Mad Lib —
adjective, noun, season — that almost anyone could use to outline goals for the
season.
The phrase was used to express hope for a Hot
Vax Summer of swab-free debauchery in 2021. Meghan Markle was having a Single
Girl Summer when she met Prince Harry, according to their Netflix documentary.
The meme even expanded its seasonal footprint into Christian Girl Autumn and
Short King Spring.
E.E. Holmes, 41, a writer in central
Massachusetts, sees versions of the phrase roll across her Twitter feed every
May. In 2021, she scrolled past posts about Hobbit Girl Summer (living in a
shire, eating potatoes) and “Gone Girl” Summer (disappearing mysteriously).
Holmes added her own to the canon: “Golden
Girls” Summer. “I’m thinking, the chilling and the cheesecake and the
girlfriends and drinks on the lanai,” she said. “I don’t want to have to shave
too much.”
Making such predictions may be a way of
dealing with the immense expectations of the season.
Beginning in childhood, Americans look forward
to summers off from school, from which they might return with bangs or new
boyfriends.
The season lends itself to coming-of-age
stories, from Edith Wharton’s “Summer” to the film “Wet Hot American Summer.”
It can also be a time of social upheaval, as in 1967, when nationwide riots
against racial injustice coincided with San Francisco’s freewheeling Summer of
Love.
There is a pervasive idea that “summer is the
apex of living,” said Sheila Liming, an associate professor at Champlain
College in Burlington, Vermont, and the author of “Hanging Out: The Radical
Power of Killing Time.” It is a season of exposure, especially in the
Northeast, where warmer weather and more hours of daylight are welcomed after a
chilly winter.
“Summer is the season in which we actually
live out in public,” Liming said.
Gazelle Mone’t, a 29-year-old stylist, said
she felt more pressure to socialize in the summer. “In the winter, it’s cool if
you’re just inside,” she said. “In the summertime, it would be fun to kayak,
like, not alone.”
Mone’t began telling people that she wanted to
have a Soft Woman Summer, hoping to find others who might skip the club scene
and go paint in the woods. She recently took a road trip with friends from
Seattle to Joshua Tree National Park, in Southern California.
Angela Neal-Barnett, a psychology professor at
Kent State University, in Ohio, said announcing a plan for the summer ahead of
time was a form of visualization. “I have to commit to it, because people are
going to come back and ask me, ‘Did you do the Hot Girl Summer, or the Hot
Margarita Summer, or whatever it is?’” she said.
‘Come
on now’
Media outlets and companies have also,
unsurprisingly, taken to branding the season.
Brandy Jensen, a former deputy editor at
Gawker, said she had noticed a series of absurd summer trend predictions in
recent weeks. A Rolling Stone article declared 2023 the summer of the “side
chick,” citing Kerry from “Succession,” Queen Camilla, and Raquel Leviss from
“Vanderpump Rules.” The Cut decreed a Barefoot-Boy Summer because actor Jacob
Elordi and a member of singer Shawn Mendes’ entourage had both been spotted
shoeless.
Jensen said she found both stories
entertaining — but she is not slipping off her shoes just yet. “Websites want
clicks,” she said, and nesting three recent pop culture moments under a “trend
of the summer” label is easy but not always accurate.
“Are we really having a Barefoot-Boy Summer?”
she said. “Come on now.”
Brands have also tried to place their own
products at the center of summer’s purported theme. Spotify offers a Sad Girl
Summer playlist with an image of a melting Popsicle. Wendy’s tried to declare
its lemonade the official drink of Hot Girl Summer in 2019.
Megan Thee Stallion has noticed. “I saw other
companies were using it, and I was like, ‘Thank you for your support, but I
have to secure this, because this is mine,’” she said. She was awarded the
trademark for Hot Girl Summer in 2022.
But if the past few weeks are any indication,
the song’s title may remain a blueprint for our best — and worst — theories
about the season to come.
Cristel Antonia Russell, a professor of
marketing at the Graziadio Business School at Pepperdine University, said she
would not be surprised if the phrase continued to be used for years. It
reminded her of “Got Milk?” — the 1990s dairy-industry advertising campaign —
in its simplicity and adaptability.
“It sounds so timeless,” Russell said. “Who
doesn’t want to be hot, and a girl, in the summer?”
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