It may have originated as a Tumblr aesthetic, but now the sad girl is everywhere: the music of Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey and Phoebe Bridgers; TV shows like Fleabag, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, You’re The Worst, and Dickinson; and books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Normal People and Conversations with Friends. These huge cultural movements may not touch directly on contemporary women’s struggles, but the characters at their heart are all attempting to reflect a truth of what being a millennial or gen-z woman is, and create a space to talk about how difficult, traumatic, and just tiring it can be.
Transcript
The sad girl is having a moment. It may have originated as a Tumblr aesthetic, but now the sad girl is everywhere: the music of Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey and Phoebe Bridgers; TV shows like Fleabag, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, You’re The Worst, and Dickinson; and books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Normal People and Conversations with Friends. These huge cultural movements may not touch directly on contemporary women’s struggles, but the characters at their heart are all attempting to reflect a truth of what being a millennial or gen-z woman is, and create a space to talk about how difficult, traumatic, and just tiring it can be. The sad girls’ sadness isn’t a heavily politicized rage; it’s an internalized burden—a directionless angst that’s being filtered through music, film and literature. Here’s our take on the sad girl, and how she’s giving us a catharsis for difficult times.
CHAPTER ONE: SAD GIRL POP
Pop music typically feels joyous and optimistic, so why has the sad girl found such a home there? Some say that ‘sad girl pop’ as a mainstream genre took off during Billie Eilish’s ascendence and inspired talents like Olivia Rodrigo and Gracie Abrams; still, many female pop artists before her have imbued their music with deep melancholy–think Robyn, Fiona Apple and Lana Del Ray
Many argue that Fiona Apple pioneered sad-girl pop in the 90’s, while in the modern era, it was Lana who kicked off this current sad-girl moment. Her music came with a specific aesthetic that felt moody, melancholy and nostalgic, and got embraced by communities on Tumblr. It has an immersive quality–fans could lose themselves in Lana’s music, and then curate their own aesthetic and moodboards in conversation with that music. Emma Madden describes this aesthetic as ‘soft grunge’, something which
“both beautified and subdued pain, making it consumable and even aspirational.”
- Jezebel
Lana’s song Pretty When You Cry, and the glut of hashtagged selfies that it inspired, reflected this tension between beauty and pain, while making fans feel they’re somehow a part of the sad girl world Lana had created.
Lana Del Rey: “Because I’m pretty when I cry”
- Pretty When You Cry
Then, Billie Eilish’s music, while clearly indebted to Lana’s, moved away from this high glamor aesthetic and toward something even stranger and darker. Where Lana was styled somewhere between a vintage pin-up and a blue-jeans midwesterner, Billie’s early looks were all about covering her body up and removing any trace of sex appeal, almost performing a kind of masculinity by wearing beanit hats and oversized sportswear. Instead of trying to glamorize her sadness, Billie’s music instead invites her fans to try and experience it through her eyes.
Billie Eilish: “There was all these labels and radio people that wouldn’t play me because I was too sad and no-one was gonna relate to it. That was funny to me cos I was like, everybody has felt sad.”
- CBS Sunday Morning
Still, Eilish’s music is performing a similar function by creating a safe space for fans to feel these feelings. And now, Phoebe Bridgers concerts have become known for ending with a cathartic mass screamalong to her song I Know The End. It’s helped create even more closeness between fans and artists in an era where fans desire that intimacy more than ever. Fans share memes of Phoebe Bridgers and other sad girl artists like Mitski and Taylor Swift, alongside the line “Therapists HATE Them.” These singers are not just popstars to us. They’re confidantes, and their songs reflect back the personal anxieties and concerns their audiences feel.
CHAPTER TWO: A SHIFT IN GAZE
The sad girl’s rise also aligns with a general shift toward more women telling their stories, with an emphasis on exploring their interior selves
In 2012, Lena Dunham’s Girls was a turning point for the way it rejected the common wisdom that a female main character had to be likable, or even relatable. Hannah Horvath is often arrogant, elitist and entitled. She’s also, importantly, anti-glamour. While we do see her taking her clothes off and having sex, rarely is she styled or shot in a sexy way. She is not there for the pleasure of the male gaze; instead everything feels like a window into who she is and how she feels. This intimacy was taken even further in 2016 with the cultural phenomenon that was Fleabag. The protagonist’s fourth wall-breaking quips to camera act as a self-deprecating disassociation from the grief and the heartbreak she goes through across the two seasons.
Meanwhile, there is again that tension between beauty and pain. This is the show that turned a black jumpsuit into a must-have fashion item. Whose promo image—Fleabag staring into the camera with mascara running down her face—could be taken from a #prettywhenyoucry Tumblr page. Such was Fleabag’s cultural impact that she has almost helped create a genre in and of herself. Netflix’s (much less artistically successful) Persuasion adaptation was described as a Fleabagification of Jane Austen with Anne transformed into someone resembling a millennial-era hot mess. And we see the influence in shows like Alma’s Not Normal and Out Of Her Mind, and Oscar-winner Promising Young Woman, which too focuses on a messy female protagonist navigating the grief over losing her best friend.
Part of what’s so seductive about this sadness is how it challenges the traditional male gaze, and allows female characters to exist outside of it. Previously these more alternative women may have been filtered through a male lens, turned into fantasy manic pixie dream girl characters whose sadness is just one of their many adorable quirks. But now, these messier, sadder characters are paired with a depth and richness that makes them less cute and more relatable. When we meet Mabel from Only Murders In The Building, it’s in the middle of her processing a huge amount of trauma. She’s not simply a meek foil to the show’s two male leads; instead she’s an equal partner whose story and background is just as important as theirs. In Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, Héloïse is in the process of having her story and her character reduced to an image commissioned and paid for by a man, for her wedding. Director Céline Sciamma turns this act of painting Héloïse’s portrait into a film where men are almost entirely absent. The result adds layers and richness to who the fictional portrait subject is. It’s a devastating ending, because we know the true story of her life is about to be forgotten, but there’s a catharsis in knowing that we’ve heard it.
CHAPTER THREE: FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS?
So…what does the sad girl really have to be sad about? That’s one of the criticisms leveled against the trend. That hers is a bourgeois, middle-class struggle that can sometimes feel like no struggle at all. Normal People author Sally Rooney’s protagonists are often lumped in with this criticism, because while they’re gloomy and unhappy, their lives seem…kind of fine?
These “waif girls” fit into the sad girl aesthetic, but their sadness doesn’t feel directly connected to anything in the way that, say, Fleabag’s is connected to losing her best friend and her mother. It’s a more existential, French New Wave-esque ennui. Rebecca Liu describes this “archetypal millennial” as: “pretty, white, cisgender, and tortured enough to be interesting but not enough to be repulsive. Often described as ‘relatable,’ she is, in actuality, not.”
But it’s a widespread fallacy that sadness must have one, clear, easily diagnosable cause–or that only people with the most extreme problems or hardships get to feel depressed. Perhaps the problem with the sad girl label is how it reduces lots of different complex experiences to something universal. Singer Mitski has spoken out against the label herself, and you can see why. Her songs may be sad, but they also speak to lots of other nuanced emotions, and her specific experience as an Asian American woman is obviously inherently different from the experiences of a Lana Del Rey or a Taylor Swift. Michelle Zauner’s New York Times best-selling memoir Crying In H Mart may fit the sad girl moment, but as well as exploring Zauner’s own grief over the loss of her mother it also touches on a wider immigrant narrative that has gone underexplored in mainstream culture.
Mikski: “The sad girl thing was reductive and tired like 5, 10 years ago, and it still is today.”
- Crack Magazine
Other “sad girls” in pop culture are likewise communicating something else more specific: Devi in Never Have I Ever dispenses with a lot of the stereotypes associated with portrayals of Indian American characters and comes across as more well rounded, while not shying away from her angsty, rebellious feelings. And there’s a lot of emotional power in Zendaya’s sadness as the troubled Rue in Euphoria—as well as her role as the messy, complicated Marie in Malcolm and Marie, and her interpretation of MJ as a more insular, emo kid in the Spider-Man franchise.
OUTRO
The public conversation around mental health over the past decade or so has really brought people in touch with their emotions, given them a language to identify how they feel and work through it. This sad girl media all feels connected to the millennial and gen-z generations who understand the importance of mental health, but live in a world that’s still largely run by people who don’t (or prefer not to). So while some iterations of the sad girl may seem shallow at times, there’s something paradoxically joyous in having your feelings of sadness reflected back to you, and being able to cry, scream and rage without fear of embarrassment or shame-taking comfort in knowing we’re all the sad girl, sometimes, in our own distinct ways.
Rue: “Every time I feel good I think it’ll last forever. But It doesn’t”
- Euphoria: Season 1, Episode 6