Do ‘weird kids’ still exist when Tiktok has popularised alternative styles and made them more palatable to everyone else? Is the accessibility of alternative clothing contributing to the death of true ‘weirdness’ - or have the margins just shifted?
- the term ‘weird’ - otherness, what it means, how it was used
- reclaiming weirdness, and pick-me-ism
- how the evolution of social media has made weird the new normal - and whether this is a bad thing
- accessibility/mass production of alternative clothing and its effect on smaller/independent brands that had a monopoly on the alt scenes (tripp nyc, lip service, hellbunny - mid-tier bigger brands like hot topic popularising them - also talk about J-fashion brands like sexpot revenge, putumayo, h. naoto - and the evolution of brands to adapt to current audiences)
- ‘once everyone’s special, no-one will be’
At one point in the early 2000s and 2010s, there was no greater insult than to be called ‘weird’. It felt like a state of otherness, that you weren’t the kind of person that others wanted to be around, for varying reasons ranging from that you had a different sense of humour (understandable) or wore clothes that others didn’t (superficial). Some kids were able to take this in their stride, and as much as I hate the term ‘reclaim’, that’s exactly what they did with ‘weird’; it became a personal branding tool that took the sharpness off what was once a cutting comment. This isn’t new behaviour - club kids from the 80s and 90s would be happy to be called strange or bizarre - but it also came along with a slightly less favourable perception of those who would intentionally do/wear/say strange things just to set themselves apart from others in a way that they believed made them more appealing to others, referred to now as ‘pick-me-ism’. I don’t know if a term like this existed before the 2020s internet; I think we made fun of the ‘not like the other girls’ kind, but it wasn’t common enough to warrant its own label. That being said, I think pick-me-ism is accurate for the new wave of These Kinds Of People, but not for the ‘not like the other girls’ variety; there is a difference in behaviour that has grown with the age of mass consumption and the death of individuality that is stark enough to warrant its own category, although it is just an evolved version of being quirky and lul so rAnDuM xD. If I were to place these kinds of people on a scale - and I must make clear that at no point to I claim to be removed from any of these categories just because I am writing about them - it would look something like this: