Social Media Killed Individualism
By: Cecilia Floros
Downtown girl. Tomato girl. Office siren. Gorpcore. Old money. Clean girl. Rockstar girlfriend. Coastal grandma. Just 10 years ago, this mish-mash of words would contain no meaning whatsoever, and to some people it’s still gibberish. In 2025, many twenty-somethings and teenagers agree that these words describe deeply specific aesthetics that have all gone viral on various forms of social media, namely Tiktok, Instagram, and Pinterest. Having such niche concepts become well-known and distinctly named might seem like a cool side effect of social media’s obsession with categorizing absolutely everything, giving us a more accessible way of describing ourselves and our general vibes. But what about the downsides?
Much of the time, it truly feels like social media has not only killed our individuality and stifled our uniqueness, but it’s straight up dancing on their corpses. Every time somebody orders a bulk bag of charms and keychains from Temu to ‘Birkin-ify’ their purse, Jane Birkin rolls in her grave. Her namesake bag, the Hermés Birkin, was created for her by Jean-Louis Dumas after a chance encounter they’d had on a flight. Birkin, a woman constantly on the go, was tired of her usual wicker basket that she used to tote around, as it wasn’t very practical. Dumas, then-chairman of Hermés, took it upon himself to design a large, sensible bag for Birkin, and the rest is history. Birkin personalized her own Birkin with pins, patches, stickers, keychains, beads, and anything else that brought her joy. She used it constantly. She allowed it to become a well-loved, beat up purse, very contrary to how Birkins are treated today by those who get their hands on them. As a new generation discovers Jane Birkin and her iconic French ye-ye girl style, social media has let her strong sense of authenticity and originality become lost in translation. To put it Shakespearian-ly: putting crappy keychains on your purse does not a cool girl make. The entire point is to collect keepsakes and memories to decorate your bag, and more broadly, your life.
There is no fast track to uniqueness; there is no 30-second video tutorial by any influencer that can imbue you with originality and eccentricity through your phone screen. An angel loses its wings every time a new microtrend pops up and hundreds of Shein hauls are posted by fashion-focused content creators, extolling how easy it is to ‘get the look’ when you use their code for 30% off. You can’t so much as open Instagram without coming across a ‘-core’ video edit. How did we get here? It’s been a long time coming.
Some of the earliest social media and blogging sites on the Internet include LiveJournal, OpenDiary, Friendster, MySpace, Pinterest, Facebook, Youtube, and of course Tumblr. During the Internet’s humble infancy, sites like these were used to talk to real-life friends, contact new people across the world, explore different subcultures, and write about anything you had the urge to. Your daily life, your fitness routine, your relationship with your kids, your dating life, what you’re cooking, what books you’re reading: for the first time, the Internet allowed for average people to create a public, deeply personal snapshot of their lives through blogging, and later on, images and videos. The ‘curation’ of one’s life and aesthetic became even more widespread and popular with the arrival of sites that allowed for images and videos: Facebook, Youtube, MySpace, Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest. Having a page that summarized one’s life and overall vibe became a must: Tumblr users spent hours setting up their dashboard to perfectly encapsulate their online presence, displaying what shows, movies, music, fashion, and celebrities they loved, all with specifically chosen fonts, graphics, and colors. This trajectory continued on, seeping into the smartphone apps we use in the 2020s.
As the web moved from desktop computers onto our smartphones in the early 2010s, apps like Instagram and Pinterest allowed for an even more acute ‘vibe curation’ craze. One’s Instagram page described them as a person, utilizing carefully crafted combinations of selfies, filters, quotes, reposts, and whatever gaudy PicsArt collage your heart desired. Social media might only be a snapshot of a person’s existence, but it is certainly a deliberately handpicked one meant to be a sort of table-of-contents guide for those viewing it from the outside.
When smartphones became ubiquitous, so did social media. The explosion in Tiktok’s popularity over the last 5 years has led to people of all kinds flocking to the app, making for a diverse online ecosystem with sub-communities of its own. Many fashion microtrends are incubated on Tiktok, with short-form videos rapidly spreading ideas about ‘what hot girls are wearing this spring!’ ‘What shoe is a must-buy for summer?’ and on and on and on.
Social media has allowed for ‘-cores’ to proliferate in a way that no other medium has; unknown one day, and universally popular the next. People feel esoteric and different in their Adidas Sambas and low rise jeans, while simultaneously feeling included and part of the overall cultural trends that are constantly evolving on their screens. Our innate human desire to be part of the majority and the ‘in-group’ at any given time makes social media an insidious tool that companies can use to subtly (or no-so-subtly) plant ads or sponsorships for clothing that fits seamlessly with the most recent viral ‘-core.’
While it may seem on the surface that the Internet would expose us to all kinds of fashion from all types of people all around the globe, trends that are dictated by a small group still reign supreme. The time we spend on social media is constantly exposing us to hyper-specific styles that we immediately want to emulate, to show that we’re ‘in the know.’ Feeling the need to distill your style and greater aesthetic into a few words with ‘-core’ slapped on the end attempts to condense our humanity down into a single bite-sized point of data, which is impossible. What happened to personal style being just as multifaceted as the person it belongs to? To be human is to be ever changing, whether that be year to year, day to day, or minute to minute. The human urge to evolve isn’t conducive to strict categorization.
Embracing different aesthetics based on what’s speaking to you most in that moment allows us to actually actively engage with our individual sense of creativity, and that’s a beautiful thing. You’re more than the title of a Pinterest board or a hashtag on Instagram. While it might feel comforting and uncomplicated to allow yourself to sink into the murky depths of hyperspecificity so that you feel in control of your image, I urge you to delve into what brings you genuine joy - outside of the ‘-core’ suffix.