The Reign Of The Internet Sad Girl Is Over— And That’s A Good Thing
The idea that women are best when they are sad (and young, and hot) forever has given way to something truly radical.
I f you could pick a moment when the sad girl tweeted and streamed and sighed her way into the mainstream, you’d probably place the year as 2011.
That summer, Lana Del Rey emerged, fully formed, onto the internet in a whirl of beauty and tears and cigarette smoke. With her pleading looks and plaintive glances, Del Rey was a Valley of the Dolls-era Sharon Tate for the 21st century, a Bardot beauty fallen on hard times, a good girl gone despondent. The image she cultivated was one of hard, masculine men and the women who yearned for them, who grieved for them — “it’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you, everything I do” — who were nothing without them. Above all, she was capital-“S” Sad. She was something tragic, something doomed.
“Vamp of constant sorrow,” Rolling Stone proclaimed, over an image of her wearing furs and smoking sadly (of course). It’s an image that Del Rey would shrewdly utilize in the years following — whether in song names (“Summertime Sadness,” the unsubtle “Sad Girl”) or public image (flower crowns, sepia filters, a fixation with suicide and death). Something about this…
