The Girls Among Us
You shall know them by their white sneakers.
Today is both the Met Gala and Pulitzer Day, both aging institutions that have historically meant a lot to the mainstream media. But the pageviews aren’t really there any more, I don’t think! Not that it's about the pageviews! But??? —Choire Sicha
THIS JUST IN
Your Awards
Congrats to all who typed this year.
Our theater critic Sara Holdren was a finalist for a Pulitzer in criticism this year; here's one of my recent faves from her. And Mark Warren won the Pulitzer for feature writing today for this tragic story in Esquire. And congrats to the makers of Hysterical for their nomination in audio! Now let's sit back and watch the dresses.
ON THE COVER
The Girls Want to Be With the Girls
The “West Village Girl” is our local envoy from America.
“For so many people, New York seems to open a portal to the expansive lives they had always felt they should be living,” Lena Dunham writes in this week’s New Yorker, explaining why she left the city. Here, in our new cover story, we have Brock Colyar explaining the New Wave of young women who see and remake the city as their own, at least for now.
It's too bad you published this on Pulitzer Day, which means it's too late for them to include your piece. Did you notice this situation of the West Village Girl first online — or did you notice this first IRL?
I was familiar with this type coming out of the pandemic, and I was familiar with how it existed online — and then there was just a moment earlier this year when I got off the Christopher Street 1 train and it was just chaos. And everybody was wearing the same thing! A friend of mine had gone to the West Village, and when he got back, the first thing he said to me was, “I went to the West Village and all I saw were white sneakers.”
The white sneakers are so strange. I don't understand why we want to wear white sneakers.
I know. But I do feel like, in general, the whole city kind of feels like it's being taken over. Even my neighborhood, Greenpoint, feels like it's being slowly taken over by a certain kind of affluent, straight, not basic but sort of basic New Yorker.
I'm glad that they're passionate about living here, and I'm glad they're out and doing things. This is good. I'm confused because it feels like a very large monoculture, or maybe it's not even a culture? Maybe it's just people.
I think it's also just the way that trends move so fast now. If you like one of these TikToks, if you like the earrings that she's wearing, you can click through the TikTok Shop and just buy the earrings. Mass production, fast fashion, all that. I just feel like it's easier to copy-cat everyone else. But when I found really touching about these girls is that when I was spending so many months just walking around the West Village, going up and talking to people, of course I never called anyone basic when I was reporting, but it was funny how many times someone I was talking to would voluntarily bring up the fact that everyone was wearing the same thing and that they were kind of proudly basic and that they found community in that. This was not something I was expecting going in.
The one who says to you “We're all the same, we're all doing the same thing” is sort of hunting to me.
I've heard that a million times, and they would just volunteer that willingly — and I thought that was actually kind of sweet. And even the influencer Kit Keenan, their experience of this city is so much less complicated than the rest of ours. There's something kind of touching about that. Yes, everybody's making fun of all the lines. SNL did that sketch about everybody waiting on lines in New York even just to get something like a bagel. And Kit just says to me, “Oh, it's a great place to meet friends.” See, no one else would ever say that, but it's touching.
That's actually super-sweet. And you know what that means? They're talking to each other. IRL.
I met up with a bunch of the girls who are going to the writing club. That was important for me to include because I knew that some people would think snarky things about these girls living their lives on their phone, but some of them are actually trying to meet up in real life. This neighborhood is an example of that. It's happening in real life.
You did point out that this scene is extremely gendered and heterosexual too. The funny thing is there was someone on Instagram who accused you — accused us actually as a magazine — of not doing appropriate racial representation in this. And I was like, I invite you to read the article! You don't ever say they're not all white, but I would say they are extensively white.
Yes. I learned from my last piece not to comment on such matters. I know. I also loved a person on Instagram who wrote, “Are we just ignoring the gentrification in the room?” And I was like, It's the West Village. Whatcha talking about?
The ship has sailed. We used to worry about the gentrification of the West Village. I was a very young person then.
I know. I'm not Jane Jacobs!
To me, you are Jane Jacobs. I also got a sense from the people you talked to that this is maybe going to be a fairly brief moment. This is a sort of tourism, a postcollege mate-and-mingle period. They'll be in Westchester in six years.
Also, that was something else that surprised me. How many of them would say, “Oh, I'll probably live here for a few years and then I'll go back to Dallas or Raleigh,” which again is also kind of sweet. Like, I'm glad that you're getting your New York years out of the way. The pandemic was just this opportunity for a huge reset. If you look at the people who moved here during the pandemic — all the rich people, all the families were moving out, and all these Gen-Z people were moving in and they were getting cheap rents in the city and it just opened up this vacuum for the Dimes Square kids downtown and the techno-rave scene in Brooklyn and Queens to boom. This seems like the kind of youth culture that the media was overlooking while they were paying attention to those other two things.
And so New York changed and we're now grappling with what is left behind as we ignore the pandemic
Five years later.
So we just need another pandemic?
I feel like some of this will stay, though. Even though some of these girls feel so temporary, that neighborhood is just so specific. People are always going to want to live there. This is just going to happen over and over again. Even with the rent this expensive, or even more expensive, some kind of young person will be able to afford it.
As long as there are rich parents in America, the West Village will prosper. You hint that they might have a politics. What do we know? Are these sort of uniformly pro-choice people?
I think that they are interested in politics, but in like a very — God, what is the polite way to say this? There's something about them that is still quite 2017 girl-bossy. They've never really abandoned that kind of feminist pose. That’s often the extent of their politics to me. When I went to Washington, I met a bunch of boys who live in Georgetown and worked in D.C., and they were telling me that they'd like to come to New York a couple times a year to party. When I asked them where they partied, they named some of the bars that are in this piece. Those kinds of boys date these young women. Even if they are more self-identified left, the kinds of boys that they are dating and hanging around with definitely have a bit of a MAGA streak.
Click Your Way Out
Jane Pratt and I weirdly LOVE the same box fan; nothing is better for sleeping. When I travel, I will literally go to the store and buy one.
What’s it actually like inside the Met Gala? We asked Eva Chen.
You know who deserves extra cool points? Keith McNally, for having his book dinner tonight during the Met Gala.
 | A guest post by
|
idk, I find it more sad than “sweet” that people are moving to New York with the intention of seeking out friendships exclusively with people who dress the same and look the same as them. The magic of this city has always been how its density forces people to encounter and interact with people different than them, which has the potential to spark personal growth and introduce empathy towards broader perspectives. If you're moving to the West Village to specifically replicate the same experience that you have in Raleigh, what is even the point?
There’s something endearing to me about white women simply being white, rather than trying to push themselves into the cultures of others for “growth” or whatever.