Her love for make up reflects in her style. “I feel women who post pictures of themselves when they are sad or being performative about it publicly are seen as someone who is exhibiting their grief as a sort of agitation and reclaiming it,” explains Yeptho who is a makeup artist. Soon her moodboards were populated with sepia tone photographs and very feminine indie outfits. Pinterest is a wellspring of inspiration for Olo Aketho Yeptho, who stumbled upon this trend when she noticed girls drawing teardrops on their faces and taking pictures with unexplained bruising in a gloomy landscape with shards of glass or dead flowers. Alaviaa Jaffrey was contextualizing Kylie Jenner’s fashion for the Indian audience, that combined with the gloomy Mumbai weather inspired Ankolekar’s sad girl look comprising silver jewellery, dark kohl eyes, black kurtas and black tights. I had a lot of pent-up energy so I began listening to music and discovered Lana Del Rey and Arctic Monkeys,” she says. “My life was stagnant at that time and my parents pulled me out of tennis coaching because they thought I could not handle the pressure of studies and sports together. She was in tenth grade and facing pressures of secondary board exams in India, her classmates would break scales and try to cut themselves but instead of harming herself, she found solace in this trend. Shaila Ankolekar, 24, discovered this trend at 15 when it was trending on Tumblr accounts of influencers and models like Kylie Jenner, Alaviaa Jaffrey and Tania Shroff. But, like, what is the sad girl aesthetic? The theory proposes “routine female sadness and bodily stress as a general state of social/political opposition.” Sad Girl theory is based on “the notion that a woman’s sadness and its saturation on the body might be an active, autonomous, and articulate form of staging resistance.” The theory originated as a study on the cultural trope of the suicidal woman, which eventually evolved into the idea that women’s sorrow is a political agent whose unwillingness to make apologies for her misery and suffering is an act of revolt. Los Angeles-based artist Audrey Wollen, produced the Theory of Sad Girl. Every retweet, like, and “same” served as confirmation that their feelings are legitimate and that they are not alone in the battle. Boom! This trend enabled women to share and listen, or at the very least relate. In Hannah Williams’ article, The Reign Of The Internet Sad Girl Is Over And That’s A Good Thing, she explains how working women started relating to this trend when they became victims of wage stagnation and an escalating housing crisis, poor access to mental-health services, and increasingly limited reproductive rights these women had many reasons to be unhappy and cynical. For instance, young girls who are struggling with mental illness and finding solace in identifying or creating art that sad girls use purely for its cool cache. Their interests are used to create an aesthetic fad that hinges on the hallmarks of teen depression. A sad girl is characterized more by her clothes and manner, and most sad girl hobbies are independent. While the trend might seem extreme at first glance, at its core it is a form of self-expression. This trend has changed the perception of what it means to be a strong woman by rethinking actions and feelings that were previously considered weak and turning them into strengths. Girls shared blurry selfies crying in the bathroom with captions that seem meaningful, tweets about missing their ex, pictures with teardrop motifs painted on their cheeks, pills in vivid pink colours with animated captions that read “having a threesome with anxiety and depression” or “100 percent sad” are all instances of content made by sad girls. Tumblr and Instagram became places where they were most predominant. In 2015, teens were using their angst to create an aesthetic through various platforms and configurations. Where did the concept of the ‘sad girl’ come from? The star carved a niche for herself by becoming the poster child of a ‘sad girl’. This trend was given more depth by American singer Lana Del Rey who is known to produce records that are full of dreamy depression, masterfully producing songs that entail plenty of misery. Sad Girl is an aesthetic that became popular in 2015 but is still relevant in 2022, young girls from affluent Western countries would spend time online and embody a peculiar paradox: the desire to convey their innermost thoughts through a formulaic aesthetic.
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