The vibe is effervescent as I stand in Grand Central Station in New York. There’s a lady carrying a Kate Spade purse in the shape of a shell, something Ariel from The Little Mermaid might use to tote around her dinglehopper. A group of twentysomethings looks like they tumbled out of a Barbie Dream House wearing miniskirts and sundresses in shades of magenta. Everyone everywhere seems to be wearing Claire’s accessories: glittery ice cream earrings, cherry hair clips, rainbow friendship bracelets.
Many people have tried to brand the summer of 2023. But from where I stand, it looks like it’s going to be a Tween Girl Summer. All around us, people are embracing the interstitial space between childhood and adulthood.
Part of it has to do with pop culture. Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are both on tour, driving hoards of people to don their sparkliest, fiercest outfits to concerts. The big summer movies this year are perfectly tailored to the tastes of the preteen set, from The Little Mermaid reboot to Barbie to Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
This is spurring a wave of trends. There’s mermaidcore, which features clothes and makeup in shimmery shades of aqua; Barbiecore, with its maximalist, hot-pink aesthetic, is making its way into interior design, fashion, and electronics.
On a deeper level, the tween girl trend makes sense. This is our first summer since the pandemic was officially declared over. For many of us, this moment is one of excitement about the future, twinged with anxiety. This ambivalence is a hallmark of the tween years, experts say, and is a kind of metaphor for the psychological state we find ourselves in now.
The Joys and Sorrows of Tween Girls
When The Little Mermaid came out, my daughter and I decided to make an event of it. We hadn’t been to the movies since COVID-19 arrived, so we got dressed up in our best mermaid-themed outfits. At the theater, everybody else had the same idea: We were in a sea of young women wearing blue and green dresses, some with sparkly scales.
I picked a one-shouldered green dress from Lilly Pulitzer. Michelle Kelly, Lilly Pulitzer’s CEO, says the brand’s trendspotters observed Barbiecore and Mermaidcore bubbling up in fashion and quickly tapped into it. The 60-year-old brand is known for its colorful, beach-friendly aesthetic. It always has a shade of hot pink in its collection, and its prints are often inspired by sea life, since the brand’s hotspots are in coastal towns. This year, Lilly Pulitzer is putting these outfits front and center.
Kelly says that the brand’s sales have spiked this summer, as people buy outfits for their packed social calendars, making up for all the events they missed in previous years. And many are particularly focused on telegraphing optimism through their clothes, which is why the fun, bubbly tween girl aesthetic seems to be resonating. “We’ve spent so much energy trying to understand how our customer is living her life through all the changes of the past three years,” Kelly says. “There’s an innocence and sense of being carefree that women of all ages want to play into.”
But there might also be emotional complexity behind customers’ desire to wear their joy on their sleeves. Over the years, Kelly has found that many people come to Lilly Pulitzer after grappling with hard times, looking for clothes to lift their spirits.
This is also true of tween girl fashion, says Carla Stokes, who has studied tween girls for decades. She points out that the bright, sparkly aesthetic that tween girls love also tells a story of struggle beneath the surface. “It’s an awkward, notoriously challenging time,” she says. “There is physical, psychological, emotional change that is happening inside their bodies. They fantasize about being older, but they’re also scared about what that really entails.”
This perfectly encapsulates many people’s experience of the current moment. The aggressively cheery outfits people are wearing now might speak to the loss, loneliness, and emotional turmoil people have experienced in recent years. “Part of the fashion trend is related to nostalgia,” says Stokes. “People are looking back at their tween and tween years with fondness, but I imagine there’s also an acknowledgement that those years were difficult.”
The Power Of Tween Girl Culture
Older generations are fascinated with what’s happening with teens, partly as a way to predict how society will evolve in the years to come. And there’s reason to believe that Gen Zs—the bulk of whom are in their teen years—will increasingly influence mainstream culture.
Kristin Patrick, CMO of Claire’s—a brand that has been laser focused on tweens for five decades—says today’s young people yield more power because they have more fluency with social media than previous generations. “Gen X didn’t have a social media megaphone, and millennials were part of the transition toward tech,” she says. “But Gen Z and Gen Alpha know how to powerfully leverage those channels.”
In the past, Claire’s had to plug itself into subcultures to get a sense of what was hip to tweens: This meant holding focus groups and closely paying attention to the movies, magazines, and TV shows that targeted them. Today, she says tweens clearly communicate what they are into on TikTok and Instagram. This quickly creates trends on the platforms that go on to influence music, fashion, and culture more broadly.
Patrick says that Claire’s has an entire team devoted to surfacing trends that are popular with young consumers. They’re plugged into social media, but also roam the globe to understand what up-and-coming products are hot with the tween set. But Claire’s is now finding that items originally designed for tweens are increasingly popular with people in their twenties, thirties, and beyond.
This is true right now of the Barbiecore and Mermaidcore items in the store, but also applies to the many heart-shaped and food-themed products that are popular in store. “When I was a tween girl, there was very much a sense that you had particular interests that would change when you became a woman,” says Patrick, who is a Gen Xer. “But now, tweens are having an impact on the tastes of other generations.”
So there it is. Full-grown adults, like myself, are throwing ourselves into tween girl summer. We’re unabashedly wearing pizza earrings and purses shaped like popsicles. We’re rocking our shimmery swimsuits, nostalgic for the days when we pretended to be mermaids. We’re feeling the tug of childhood, even as we know we must face the hurdles that adulthood brings.
Stokes says that this trend, short-lived though it may be, might be a good thing because it allows us to empathize with tween girls and, in turn, provide them with the support as they deal with these challenging years. “There’s a lot of fun and lightheartedness that comes with being a tween,” she says. “But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that tween girls dealt with a lot of trauma and isolation during the pandemic. This could be a wake-up call to support the tweens in your life.”
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