Wait! Hang on a minute. I thought I was having the brat summer: a carnival of bacchanalian excess. The mood was set by British pop chanteuse Charli XCX, codified via her chartreuse-coloured album Brat and popularised on social media. Right now, I’m supposed to be living like a selfish adolescent, tearing up the patriarchy and “most importantly” having fun.
But just as I was embracing full brat mode, there comes another coda, more prescriptive, very sober, rather mild. This one comes courtesy of Jools Lebron, a transgender woman and TikTok influencer who has exploded on social media thanks to her videos exhorting a new type of feminine aesthetic in which the objective is to look “demure”.
The original video has now been seen some 40mn times on TikTok and inspired tens of millions of hashtags in its wake. “I don’t look like a clown when I go to work,” says Lebron, who until very recently was working in a grocery store in Illinois, but has already made enough money through her new fame to complete her transition surgery. “I’m very mindful when I’m at work. See how I look very presentable — the way I came to the interview is the way I go to the job. A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson, and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure . . . You see my shirt: only a little chee-chee out, not my chu-chu [lexicographers are still debating the meaning of ‘chu-chu’]. Be mindful of why they hired you.”
The videos themselves are a strange blend. On the one hand, they satirise the current convention for “quiet fashion”, in which bland women emulate the late Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in taupe cashmere layers and $1,000 flip-flops. It also plays with that other baffling trope of femininity on TikTok, the #tradwife, an extremely demure expression of womanhood — especially popular among Mormon influencers, who have embraced the ancient maxim that women should be pregnant, barefoot and poised before the stove.
On the other hand, the “demure” mode is one that Lebron does seem to advocate for, as her practice. In her recent interview with legendary American drag queen RuPaul, Lebron said: “I feel like demure is like a mindset. I used to be crazy and out of control, and then I found some demurity, and along with that came success.”
Naturally, you’re probably wondering: what the hell is going on here? You surely have far better things to do than examine inanely silly summer TikTok memes.
However, for members of Team Kamala at the Democratic National Convention, this smorgasbord of hashtags has been a gift when trying to engage young voters. In a US presidential election that will be hugely swayed by a few million voters who have come of age since 2020, “demurity” could well be a factor at the ballot box.
There are an estimated 150mn TikTok users in the US, and according to a study by the Pew Research Center, the proportion of voters aged 18-29 who get their news from TikTok has grown to 52 per cent. Of these, the majority of TikTok users are Democrat voters, a significant enough number for US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo to tell Bloomberg recently that shutting down the Chinese-owned platform, as has been mooted, would lead the Democratic party to “literally lose every voter under 35”.
Team Harris has seen a massive spike in popularity since harnessing the meme-machine @kamalahq on TikTok. Coupled with the Charli XCX endorsement “Kamala is brat”, Harris’s social media team has spared no opportunity to prove how relevant the presidential candidate is. There has been no shortage of moments in which to find her “very demure, very mindful” in Chicago, wearing her tan Chloé suit this week. In fact, her sobriety compared with the grotesque stylings of Messrs Trump and Vance is a telling point of difference: the author of Hillbilly Elegy seems far more likely to apply a “green cut crease”, as Lebron calls it, than Harris would before taking to the stage.
And Harris is “very mindful” of the spike in youthful interest. Last weekend it was reported that her campaign is spending $370mn in ad buys between September and the election. In The Hollywood Reporter, the campaign team announced that $200mn will go to digital platforms, although that figure did not include social media ad buys.
Harris has thus far run the full brat gamut. She embodies joy. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who never quite got to grips with humour, Chucklin’ Kamala is all about the fun. For the touchy-feely Gen Z voter, these things are deeply appealing; maybe meme empathy is a more valuable commodity than policy awareness now. Besides, it helps, when you’re trying to be serious about safeguarding reproductive freedoms or tempering gun violence, that you lighten up proceedings with the odd coconut gag. Memes are the great social emollient of the 2020s — they soothe divisions and build the squad. No surprise that we’re all hopping on those big brat currents, desperate to stay relevant and try to stay afloat.
These are strange times for female representation. And men too, frankly — this summer, they have been thrown into weird categories such as #sportsdad and #rodentmen. I’m an #almondmom (according to my daughter: very toxic, not very mindful) who can’t even do #girlmaths and prays I’m not a #pickme type. None of these things are especially elevating. Or intellectually nourishing. But they speak a certain truth.
“Demurity”, as Lebron describes it, is actually a fairly decent rubric for any human being. At its core, it cautions us to be respectful and think of other people’s feelings. And to keep our chu-chus under wraps. It is very demure, very cutesy and very considerate. Ultimately, I think that’s #ratherchic.
Email Jo at [email protected]
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