The 'Weird Girl': Coveting Authenticity in a Performer's World
Issue 3
The 'Weird Girl': Coveting Authenticity in a Performer's World
By: Rhian Kille
‘The clean girl is dead’ cries social media users, and the
‘weird girl’ is primed to take her place. Tiktok, if it is to be believed,
shows the popularity of ‘weird girl’ fiction recommendations, ‘weird girl’
fashion ideas and calls for December 2025 to be a ‘weird girl winter’ (often
soundtracked by songs off Audrey Hobert’s 2025 debut album ‘Who’s The Clown?’),
Most of all women are reclaiming their (non-descript) ‘weirdness’ and
celebrating the authenticity of their identity and personality. The authentic
individuality, alternative nature and comradery of the ‘weird girl’
offers more freedom and fun than the trends that have dominated social media in
recent years, such as the aforementioned ‘clean girl’. More than this,
within the weird girl’s popularity is a push back against a vicious trend cycle
that encourages social media users to buy a new identity to perform every six
months or so, possibly quicker or slower depending just how ‘online’
you are.
The ‘weird girl’ subculture is linked to recent interest in
embracing our childhood selves and interests, but it is also shaded by the
current cultural obsession with girlhood. A sense of superiority, of looking
down at other women who do conform, also seems like a possible
side effect of being a ‘weird girl’. It cannot be said
that I’m an unbiased voice on the subject, I can be found at any
given time among a gaggle of self-proclaimed weird, strange and
off-putting young women - the loves of my life. Even researching for this
article has triggered an urgent need cut my hair back into my signature bob,
which would inevitably lead to an ill-advised attempt to make the Joan of Arc
(Lord Farquad) bob and micro-fringe work for me. However, shining a critical
lens on the ‘weird girl’ tells us a lot about what our culture is craving, so
consider this a love letter of critical analysis.
The sub-culture, like any, is not without its pitfalls. The
weird girl’s self-acceptance is often hard-won and in spite
of opposition, a constant sense of feeling “too much” - stuck on the
outside of things, misunderstood. The chip on the shoulder of every adult woman
that was once a ‘weird girl’ in her childhood or adolescence can lead to a
close sense of community among women who feel that something about them resists
“fitting in”. However, it can also lead to a sense of superiority or gatekeeping
who gets to call themselves ‘weird’ – who is and isn’t weird ‘enough’
- and a sensitivity to performativity that can create a hostile environment.
The deviation from convention, some might say individuality complex, inherent
in the ‘weird girl’ does not lend itself well to the potential of becoming a
mainstream trend. ‘Weird girls’, now women, don’t take kindly to
the women who bullied them as teenagers now buying Shein bloomers and listening
to Chappell Roan, things they might have once would have teased them for.
Performative bloomers aside, the face of the ‘weird girl’ online, as can be
said of almost all social media trends, is still a conventionally
beautiful and thin white woman, despite the trend’s clear link to marginalised
identity. The weird girl as she appears most often online is a tempered lurch in
the direction of escaping conservatism, convention/conformity and the male
gaze, but one, in my opinion, in need of nurture, cultivation and
encouragement.
Popular aesthetics are all encoded with values; the clean
girl values natural beauty and ‘clean’ living (whatever that
means, probably purity). Many of the most popular and lasting
fashion and lifestyle trends of the last couple years have had
conservative values lurking just under the
surface. As Western politics have shifted
right, more traditional ideas of femininity have come into fashion, see
tradwives and ‘stay-at-home girlfriends’. I would
consider trends like brat summer, 2016 makeup and ‘weird girl winter’ as
countercultural trends that have sprung up in response. These trends
embrace excess in favour of restraint. Other trends, such as bleached
eyebrows and the micro-fringe, are examples of an increasingly popular desire to
break away from traditional femininity and stop catering towards the male gaze.
They reflect how the weird girl is starting to bleed out of the margins and
into the mainstream, a cultural reaction to the constant restrictive
performance and (self-)surveillance expected of women. In some ways we might
see these as subtle rebellions. Women are tired of being told that they should
all look and behave the same, and the ‘weird girl’ is leading the way.
In my brief adventure into the online world of the ‘weird
girl’ (this strange young woman has banned herself from TikTok and Instagram)
it was obvious to me why weird girl culture has a wide appeal: almost
every woman thinks they are ‘weird’ in some way. But it was also
obvious where it might be susceptible to promoting what it should oppose. If
the ‘weird girl’ becomes the new ‘clean girl’, it will become another
social media aesthetic that convinces us to try and purchase and
manufacture our identity. The rate with which these trends cycle through train
our brains to consider our identities and selfhoods as just another object,
another fast-fashion item that can be bought and thrown away. The performance
of the self becomes something cheap, temporary and
imitated. Social media in 2026 has become an advertising platform more
than anything else, which leaves us with the question: will the weird girl’s
roots in embracing one’s inner child and authentic self-expression make it
‘trend-proof’? Or will it, like everything else, be diluted into another list
of items TO BUY through TikTok shop?
The desire for ‘weird girls’ and ‘weirdness’ in
culture is also undoubtedly a reaction to our cultural obsession with
performativity. Recent popular internet language highlights a
prominent cultural fixation on false-ness, performance and being inauthentic,
from the scourge of ‘performative males’ to cries for a time before actors were
media-trained. We are desperate to return to a time where
everything wasn’t performance; the rise of ‘weird girl’ represents a
desire to return back to ourselves. The integration of the
‘weird girl’ into a lineage of consumerism and a never-ending
cycle of influence, imitation and micro-trends would sever her
from her original identity. Authentic self-expression cannot be
commodified because it cannot be replicated en-masse; as a trend it only
highlights empty all these trends are. The rise of ‘weird girl chic’
highlights our desperate desire for authenticity, to abandon self-conscious
performativity and the cycles, systems and patterns that keep us copying
others, skirting around ourselves.
I could never bring myself to begrudge the rise of weird
girls, whether people are dipping their toes in for the first time or are
homegrown, born and raised. I am so excited by the popularity of weird girl
artists all the way from Audrey Hobert to Chappell Roan (whose face is looking
down at me as I write this from where it is plastered across my walls). I can
only hope that some of this weirdness, this celebration of authentic and
strange female identities, will remain, and not be thrown out with next week’s
rubbish when it is no longer ‘weird girl winter’. Either
way, I’ll still be here with my group of weird women, laughing so
hard in our eye-catching outfits that we don’t notice the dirty looks
being thrown our way.