NEW YORK (AP) — We've demure-d our way through 2024. We've played passenger princess. We've baked enough sourdough to cover the world with our bubbly starters. We've rawdogged it and we've hyped it. All of it.
There's lots to leave behind as the new year rolls around. Here's a tiny tip of the iceberg of what we're over as we move on to 2025.
Summer's over demure-ers!
TikToker Jools Lebron's 38-second video describing her workday makeup routine as “Very demure. Very mindful” lit up the summer with memes. The video has been viewed more than 50 million times.
With her newfound fame, Lebron, a transgender woman, was able to earn toward her transition, help her family, rack up some brand deals and make a big statement about staying positive. In another video, she got the world going on “very cutesy.”
Love you, Jools! But here's the thing all you meme-makers: Summer's over. We're also looking at you, “brat” enthusiasts. The summer slime greenness of it all and the Charli XCX-Kamala Harris moment were great! We know you'll keep it demure as you move on to the next big thing.
As for all those dogs and cats eeeking out in videos over President Donald Trump's Haitian immigrant remark? Here's to a calmer 2025 for you, Springfield, Ohio.
Passenger princesses: Take the wheel
Speaking of demure but no longer cutesy, in the name of all things Holy Feminism, passenger princesses must abdicate.
A passenger princess, according to Urban Dictionary, is “a pretty girl that has no other job but to look pretty in the passenger seat while her sneaky link/boyfriend/significant other drives.” What's a sneaky link, you might ask? It's a secret hookup. For sex.
Passenger princesses decorate their sides of front seats with little baubles in the air vent. They pack in snacks on little trays that fit on their Stanley cups. They bring cozy blankies, replace visor mirrors with fancy lit ones and generally reign while demanding their men place one hand on their nearest leg.
The term has been around since at least 2020, when a Twitter (now X) user called his dog a passenger princess on a photo of said dog in the front seat of his car. That, eventually, morphed into human princesses storming TikTok.
Take the wheel, dear princesses. We know you know how to drive. And congrats, TikToker @masonshea. Your passenger prince video has amassed more than 60 million views since you posted an equal treatment grab in early 2023.
Bubble dressing, pop off
Unless you're in a K-pop girl band and-or young, tall and stick-thin, this fashion thang looks good on exactly no one. And it's back. On runways. In streetwear. On shopping sites and store shelves.
Why reach for puff ball dresses, skirts, bloomers and tops with so many other options out there? Teen Vogue noted Gen Z's embrace in September, describing the silhouette as having a form-fitting waist and balloon-like hem. It's, wait for it, “feminine and romantic” and “draws attention to the body,” the magazine said.
Not, on the aforementioned, in a good way. And that means the majority of women.
“There is just something funny about bubble hems and the way they, well, bubble up around your thighs,” Harper Bazaar's Tara Gonzalez wrote in August. “They’re vaguely diaperlike in that sense, which is why they aren’t a crowd-pleaser. Instead, they’re something either you get or you don’t.”
Bubble dresses, in various iterations, are hardly fresh fashion. Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent got there first in the 1950s. They, yes, bubbled back up in the 1980s, and again in the 2000s.
Dare to be different!
Ooey gooey sourdough starter videos
What did we do during the lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic? We baked bread. Specifically, we went nuts for sourdough because we were home with time on our hands to feed our starters and tend to our rises and bake our loaves.
Well, some of y'all are still putting up sourdough videos, naming your starters, selling dehydrated bits of your starters, spending hours on rises and pull-and-folds and waxing wise on which tools and baskets are the best.
The world has re-started. Keep your bread videos to yourselves. Your starters bubble. They multiply. Your dough rises and rises again. Your little razor cuts are epic. Sourdough bread is lovely and it's healthy and, now, we all know how to make it.
Sourdough videos? No need. Thank you for your service.
Rawdogging: Dump it both ways
Depending on who you are, rawdogging has different meanings. There's having sex without a condom. And there's the male-driven travel trend of eschewing all distractions and movement and sustenance while long-haul flying. The latter raw dogging spiked in 2024.
You've got your hyper-male enthusiasts looking to, well, be hyper-male. And you've got your travelers seeking to lock in some sort of mindfulness or uber-focus or, what? Who knows.
Listen: You paid for that ticket. Enjoy the food and music and movies. Also, not drinking is just dehydration silly. So is blood clot-worthy not moving around.
Finding your center by simply staring at the in-flight map seems, simply, pointless. Here's to a rawdog-free new year. The same goes for that plane seat belt thing where people find it somehow useful (not) to buckle up at the ankles, their knees hiked to their chins. C'mon. That can't be all that comfortable, let alone safe. Happy turbulence to you all.
Speaking of travel trends, shove off people curating the contents of your TSA trays. As for those among you who bought TSA trays to conveniently produce content at home. Not cutesy.
Social media hype talk, take a breath!
These potatoes. I mean, come ON! Are you kidding me? Wow, just wow. Don’t sleep on these! Potatoes!
Where there are content creators, there's hype talk. There's a superlative mountain. There's fake amazement, surprise, excitement over the mundanest of mundaney things as the race for likes, shares and comments carries on.
And there's a plague of weird verbalisms that make various tasks sound like battlegrounds: I'm “going in” with the ranch dressing. I'm “going in” with this concealer. I'm “frying off” the garlic. I'm gonna “hit it” with the salt!
Much has been made of social media speak for decades. This species is just so dumbly an attempt to make something truly boring sound viral worthy. It spread faster than a runaway money train.
Take a breath. We'll look at you making potatoes. We promise.
Standalone 'staches, wiggle away
The chevron. The Dali. The pencil. The walrus.
Since virus lockdowns offered men the time and space to curate their faces, mustaches all by their lonesome have been on the rise. Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, Pedro Pascal, The Weeknd and Jacob Elordi rocked their 'staches sans beards on red carpets and social media, upping the nowness of it all.
As of September 2022, Gillette estimated that 12.5 million men in the U.S. had mustaches. That's a 1.5% increase from March 2020. The shaving company launched a facial hair-grooming brand, King C. Gillette, to ride the wave.
Mustaches, with beards. Fine. Freestanding mustaches. Polarizing. Do we thank a contingent of ironical millennials looking to revisit the past for this, uh, trend? What about the unironical? Do we point to Miles Teller's character in the 2022 film, “Top Gun: Maverick?”
Teller's 'stache was a nod to Anthony Edwards’ similar one in the original 1986 “Top Gun.” This is not 1986.
Have a nice day.
Dorm rooms on steroids
Fancy headboards. Custom-made cabinetry. An interior designer. Dorm room decor for some is way, WAY off the rails, leaving students who can't afford to spend thousands in the dirt.
The cost of college — tuition, fees, room and board — nearly doubled between 1992 and 2022, rising from an inflation-adjusted average of $14,441 per year to $26,903 across all types of schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Dorm costs saw a similar increase in the same time span, $3,824 to $7,097.
Hello haves and have-nots. We see you. And thank you TikTok for fueling the frenzy.
Over It runners-up
Karens: Airplane Karens. In-store Karens. Neighbor Karens. Park Karens. Yes, we've mentioned you before and, lo, you're still here. You've had your day. You've had your years. Meds. Therapy. Whatever it takes.
Sanewashing: Advance the power of facts. End the false equivalence. In all things. That is all.
Anti-aging products for young girls: Damage has been done. Parents, get a grip.
Paging Dr. Beat: Emergency, emergency! All you walking-in-place video creators showing off your scrubs and your jammies and your entire wardrobes. Tired content. Cut it out. New year. New song. New memes.
Leanne Italie, The Associated Press
