TikTok Gave Everyone Taste. Now We All Look the Same.

Eleanna Liaskou

1 day ago

4 min read

The internet taught everyone how to look effortlessly cool. In doing so, it may have destroyed the very thing we were trying to imitate.

I recently came across a viral video discussing how Hailey Bieber’s stylist approaches something as seemingly insignificant as her coffee-run outfits. There was something almost fascinating about hearing the strategy behind a look designed to appear as though very little strategy had gone into it. The oversized jacket, the tiny sunglasses, the perfectly casual shoe, the proportions that suggest she simply threw something on before leaving the house. Suddenly, the coffee run looked less like an errand and more like an editorial assignment.

It made me wonder whether we are officially witnessing the death of the Cool Girl.

Not because women have stopped wanting to be her. If anything, we have never had more instructions for becoming her. TikTok can tell you which hobbies she has, what she orders, which trainers she wears, where she travels and what belongs inside her handbag. The problem is that once coolness becomes this legible, it stops functioning as coolness at all.

Cool Only Works When You Cannot See the Performance

Sociologist Erving Goffman spent much of his career examining something slightly uncomfortable about human behaviour: social life involves performance. We construct versions of ourselves depending on where we are, who is watching and what we want them to understand about us. What we interpret as authenticity is often simply a performance whose construction remains invisible.

The Cool Girl might be one of fashion’s most successful versions of this. In the 1990s, someone like Kate Moss was aspirational partly because she seemed genuinely inaccessible. She was beautiful and reckless, but crucially, she appeared unbothered by both. Her clothes looked discovered rather than researched. Her lifestyle seemed to exist somewhere beyond ordinary participation, inside clubs you could not enter and social circles you could not recreate by buying the correct leather jacket.

The appeal was never entirely the aesthetic itself. It was the visible distance between us and her.

Coolness required mystery. You could copy the slip dress, but you could not necessarily copy the world that made the slip dress look convincing. The clothes functioned as evidence of cultural fluency, social access and belonging rather than instructions for acquiring them. The Cool Girl succeeded because nobody handed you the manual.

Then the Internet Gave Us the Manual

Today, the Cool Girl is increasingly available as a purchasable template.

Every few months, another version arrives with an accompanying shopping list. There are trend reports explaining which hobbies stylish women are taking up, guides to achieving model-off-duty dressing and videos dissecting the supposedly insignificant details that make someone appear expensive, interesting or effortlessly put together.

Even imperfection has become curated. Grainy photographs, half-eaten dinners, blurry nights out and intentionally chaotic photo dumps once suggested that someone was too busy living to worry about presentation. Now, we understand those codes well enough to reproduce them deliberately. The backstage has swallowed the front stage.

We know that the celebrity coffee run may involve a stylist. We know that the spontaneous paparazzi photograph can become part of a wider branding ecosystem. We know which vintage-looking jacket was bought new and which seemingly accidental Instagram carousel was assembled from dozens of possible images.

Brands have responded by selling proximity to coolness directly. Instead of merely selling an object, they sell the cultural identity surrounding it: the café you should visit while carrying the bag, the book you should leave beside it, the city you should imagine yourself living in.

But there is an obvious contradiction here. The harder something works to communicate that you are effortlessly cool, the more visible the effort becomes.

When Trying Became the Embarrassing Part

Perhaps this explains why depth suddenly feels more aspirational than polish.

There is a noticeable fascination among Gen Z with “locking in”: learning languages, reading difficult books, developing niche hobbies, running marathons, sewing, ceramics, cooking properly or becoming genuinely knowledgeable about something.

At the same time, another aesthetic shift is moving in the opposite visual direction. Bare nails, less polished photographs, visible repetition of outfits and captions containing the occasional typo can function almost like status signals, precisely because they suggest that optimisation is no longer the priority.

Neither impulse is entirely outside performance, of course. The internet can turn reading Dostoevsky into an aesthetic just as easily as it turned drinking an iced coffee into one. But there is an important distinction between something that can be purchased immediately and something that requires accumulated time.

You can buy the sunglasses. You cannot instantly buy taste.

You can recreate an outfit from Pinterest. You cannot order cultural fluency with next-day delivery.

Perhaps this is why competence, knowledge and specificity are beginning to feel strangely luxurious. In an online culture capable of reproducing almost any aesthetic within weeks, depth retains one advantage: it is difficult to manufacture quickly.

What Comes After the Cool Girl?

The Cool Girl worked best when performing her correctly required access to information most people did not have. You needed cultural fluency, social proximity, money, geography or simply the right postcode. Her power depended on scarcity.

The internet dismantled much of that scarcity. It taught millions of people the visual language of exclusivity, while brands simultaneously discovered how profitable it was to package that language and sell it back to us.

This does not mean status disappears. It simply relocates.

Once everyone can purchase the symbols, the symbols lose some of their power. The valuable thing becomes whatever remains difficult to reproduce at scale: knowledge, skill, community, eccentricity, genuine taste or the confidence to have interests that cannot be explained through a trend forecast.

Maybe the Cool Girl is not disappearing so much as losing her monopoly on aspiration. We have seen behind the curtain, met the stylists and learnt the formulas. The performance still looks beautiful, but it no longer looks effortless. And perhaps the next truly cool thing will be having something about yourself that nobody can turn into a tutorial.