girl blog

Someone introduced me at a party as a “writer” and I had to say that no, I wasn’t a writer. She has a Substack, said my friend. I would call myself a girl with a blog. It’s a pointless and arbitrary distinction that I would never enforce on the people around me, who I generally encourage to consider themselves writers. Whenever anyone asks me, I usually say “I write". the same way that when people ask me if I cook, I usually say, “I make food.” Cooking seems to require more investment, more skill.

Anyway, since writing is labor and so on, I’ve decided to try a paid subscription option (it’s $5 a month or $50 a year). I’ll still post some free essays but the more extensive ones and the archive will be for paid subscribers. If you truly can’t afford this or if we’re irl friends, write me and I can sort you out.

Someone I know texted me to say I should write about Addison Rae. I don’t know very much about her besides her controversial friendship with Kourtney Kardashian, which I know a weird amount about, and her Praying bikini debacle (similarly). I did listen to her new EP though and found it incredibly fun, vibrant, upbeat pop that absolutely brightened my day (mostly spent on my hands and knees deep cleaning my new apartment). The highlight of the album is probably “2 die 4,” feat. Charli XCX, a sparkly viral TikTok sensation. My favorite song though is “it could’ve been u”, which is spiritually something like “Single Ladies” for girls who aren't into marriage. An anthem made for me personally.

I did listen to the Nymphet Alumni emergency roundtable on Addison Rae from August 2022 when she appeared in a Praying x Adidas ad wearing the provocative “Father, Son, Holy Spirit” bikini. In the ad, she’s wearing glittery silver eye makeup and you can just see the top part of the bikini “Father/Son".” Her mouth is open in a way that prompts a visual association with a cum shot, although the image isn’t especially sexual in and of itself.

The ad, and Addison Rae’s massive fanbase, catapulted the bikini beyond its core audience of edgy e-girls, and had a significant backlash. She ended up deleting the picture from her Instagram. But it also had the side effect maybe of making her a little bit cooler, a little edgier, more subversive. She’s sweet but not saccharine, sincere but not totally wholesome, pretty in an all-American kind of way. In some ways this is actually similar to Praying’s brand, which is overall less subversive than it may seem based on this one image.

I’m kind of agnostic about Praying, although I think some of their designs are fun and/or creative. It’s similar in a lot of ways to Ashley Williams, whose designs I do really like, but is both at a more accessible price point and also has a kind of fundamental visual simplicity to it, as the Nymphet Alumni girls point out. Ashley Williams doesn’t only design slogan based clothing. She also has full collections and uses graphic imagery and color in creative ways even on the slogan based t-shirts. They have other aesthetic references, they feel fun and joyful and sophisticated. The same is true of the coveted hair pins for which she is maybe best known.

Although the Ashley Williams slogans have a similar ironic and understated feeling, the plainness of Praying’s designs more easily offer subculture identification. It’s like the way Brandy Melville might have a Venice Beach, CA t-shirt. You can wear it and feel like a surfer girl even if you live far away from the ocean and have never surfed. It’s kind of saying something but it’s also kind of saying nothing. It exists in the same vague space as astrology, offering the fallacy of personal validation. It lends itself to the internet trend where you can identify what kind of girl you are, described in a recent Vox article as a “marketing campaign.” Generic forms of consumption become a basis for identity. Wearing the Praying Twilight bag (which I was tempted to buy) suggests that you’re a romantic, that you’re not ashamed to love teen culture (or are ironically leaning into it), that you maybe subscribe a little bit to the extreme traditionalism of the story, that you were a Twilight teen and not a Harry Potter teen or a Hunger Games teen. The bag has the classic Praying format where it could read either “Always remembered/never forgotten” or “Always forgotten/never remembered,” offering an additional layer of inscrutability.

But the reality is that Twilight is one of the most successful young adult series of all time. The books had sold an estimated 160 million copies worldwide as of 2021 and were translated into 49 languages. How much does it really say about you if you carry a Twilight bag? There’s a fundamental normcore, pastiche aesthetic to it, identifying publicly, but in a cool way, with something very, very popular and arguably quite uncool.

Biz Sherbert (one of the Nymphet Alumni girls) wrote in I-D back in 2021 that “postmodern spirituality is like a trip to an old fashioned candy store, the kind where you get a bag and fill it up with a mix of whatever sweets you want […] The same is true of alt-trad fashion — things that were once sacred and things that were once subcultural transform into free-floating signifiers that mingle among each other.” It’s tired at this point to say that the weightlessness of postmodern meaning, its confused identifications, ultimately flattens towards fascism. But still, having a viewpoint is perhaps underrated.

Anyway, Addison Rae, overall an unproblematic celebrity, other than her bikini dustup and her friendship with Kourtney Kardashian (which led Kourtney’s sisters to confront her and ask if they were secretly “hooking up”). She has the theatricality of a TikTok star, the perfect sense of timing. She plays with different subcultures and trends but never goes too far. She always looks happy. In a recent TikTok video she posted, set to Rosalía’s (failed) engagement song “Tuya,” she and her weird boyfriend peck at each other like birds. In another one, she lies on a couch in a baggy white t-shirt, her eyes made up like she put a whole Urban Decay pallet on them, and mouths along to Lana Del Rey’s “Taco Truck x VB,” it’s me your little Venice bitch. One of her fans comments, “addison what era are you in rn?”

She’s definitively in her pop star era. Praying girl no more. Although they have a bag coming out this fall that feels synchronous with her album, a bag I am also tempted to buy. It’s a season for self-confidence.