“Kinda chic” of you to read this article. “Kinda chic” of me to write it. Everything is chic nowadays, which means that nothing can be chic at all.
If you’ve opened TikTok or Instagram in the past three months, you’ll have likely seen the word “chic” beat to death. Every other video is overlayed with butter-yellow text reading “kinda chic to [insert genuinely anything here].” British Vogue declared the adjective dead as of May 2025, and over a year later, it’s well past six feet under. Anything from the car you drive to the way you part your hair to the way you decide to spend your afternoon has the capacity to be chic. At that point, why use the word at all?
When I was a child, the word “chic” evoked a particular ideal of womanhood. I recall being enamored by the notion of elegant, stylish poets and journalists living in big cities and drinking martinis. As a teenager, my obsessions shifted to twentieth-century runway archives — if you asked me to define “chic” at any point in my life up to a year ago, I’d cite Carrie Bradshaw or the silhouette of a dress from Ralph Lauren’s Spring/Summer 1998 collection. Given my longtime aspiration towards “chic”, I’m inclined to defend it. Although it means very little now, the death of a singular word symbolizes a greater loss of nuance and increasing linguistic homogenization.
The charm of chic lives in the details: a smudge of red lipstick or a thrifted Dior scarf repurposed as a belt, perhaps. The death-knell-declaring British Vogue article puts it perfectly: “‘Chic’ in its purest form is subtle — found in the drape of a sleeve or a stray strand of hair.” It takes a mosaic of tiny details to make someone or something truly chic, not just a singular product you can buy.
Chic is often misconstrued as a marker of upper-class life (designer brands, overpriced sushi and skincare, whatever the millionaire of the week is buying and/or doing). Announcing that the car you drive or the drink you order at a bar is chic imposes unrealistic standards based on material value. It makes chic a moniker of what you have over what you do and who you are. Consumerist whims cycle in and out as fast as “chic” rose and fell.
Trend cycles are most often considered in a fashion context. Take Lirika Matoshi’s strawberry dress from 2020. Everyone wanted one, and once enough people dropped $500 to acquire the dress, it turned overdone and plebian. A beautiful piece of art became a cultural index fossil sent to rot in landfills or live in thrift store purgatory. Now, the same pattern befalls words: beloved, overused, beat-to-death, discarded. With words, however, we have much more at stake.
Thanks to linguistic homogenization and declining media literacy rates, nuance is being outshined by marketability. Social media algorithms favor known trends which appear in templates (“kinda chic to [whatever]”), thus training us to think, speak and present ourselves formulaically. Gone is the subtle beauty and art that lives in fine details and personal touches. Now, everything has to be marketable (i.e. flashy, “trendy” and surface-level) enough to stop scrollers in their tracks. Take a trend, fill in the blanks and you’ll be easily promoted to the masses who engage with it. Participating in fun TikTok trends is harmless until formulaic thinking begins to seep into everyday life, particularly our language.
When one word can mean everything, does it not also mean nothing? Our very fabric of communication and expression is losing meaning. In chic’s wake came the epidemic of “whimsy”, which, despite its complete opposite definition, has come to mean the same thing — that is to say, everything and nothing. Not to get all “1984,” but this should warrant some concern.
Chic began with dirty martinis and kitten heels; she slowly asphyxiated under the weight of countless brand-coopts and word salad. As we leave “chic” crushed under the boot of capitalism and reaching out a twitching hand for her good friend “whimsy,” I retain a blind faith that both will slowly crawl their ways back into our vernacular — this time, I hope, correctly.