Hot Divorcée Summer, Jelly Tech, Euphoria

You guys know how I love to sit in a darkened with a giant cork board and a spool of red thread the circumference of a wagon wheel? Some of my deep dives don’t have enough substantial evidence to become full essays (yet), but they’re too juicy to drop, so I’ve decided to round them up in this monthly dispatch series.

I used this format because there’s no way I can seamlessly transition from my Euphoria/Love Island thoughts to my theories on why playing with dinosaur toys as kids has made people obsessed with documentation and record-keeping.

This was probably the most fun I’ve had writing a post, so I’ll be doing more of these. If you’re not interested in them and only want my full essays, you can configure your settings here.

Everything in fashion is trending translucent (jelly shoes, translucent firkins, etc.), at least according to Polyester.1 I’ve definitely seen plenty of toes straining against jelly netting this summer, a banquet cooked up by God directly for Love Island’s Samraj, who is this season’s token toe gobbler. (Why is there one every year? And why is so much screen time dedicated to them soliloquising about how much they’d love to suck a foot?)

Online, I’ve also seen this yearning for the translucent play out in people’s fantasies for the return of see-through tech. I’d like to call it jelly tech. The Polyester article makes a case that our cultural desire for translucency stems from a more metaphorical desire for transparency (frankness, candidness, voyeurism), and you could definitely stretch that metaphor to tech, but I can also see a simpler reason.

In the last couple of decades, we’ve started seeing smartphones as quasi-magical devices, and this hasn’t gone well for us. Our magic wands are ruining our health while their Caligulan creators sink their fangs into the earth and suck it dry, etc. By returning to jelly-tech aesthetics, we get to express nostalgia for a time when tech felt fun, but we also have a visual reminder: it’s just a machine. I can see its circuit boards and wires. It’s not magic. It’s just a machine.

Divorce is becoming more and more accepted and, in the current heteropessimistic climate, you could even say aspirational…? If you’ve got the money, divorce can be glam. Emily Ratajkowski’s £90K2 divorce ring spotlighted the trend of divorce jewellery, and Reformation released “The Divorce Collection” with Kim K’s divorce attorney.

This chic divorcee undercurrent has been budding for a while, and I’m sure it’ll explode once Ozempic decimates all those marriages it’s predicted to.3 But what’s key here is that, outside a few tweets about how being divorced before 30 is chic, this girlypop divorce culture moment hasn’t happened yet. A few isolated moments don’t make a trend. So why do I keep seeing articles like the following…?

According to Vogue, The Times, and ABC’s The View, it’s Hot Divorcee Summer. As these outlets define it, this is a largely aesthetic movement (they note that you don’t need to be divorced to join — stolen valour?) HDS is all about big hats and “full-length skirts.” (I’m sort of picturing a suffragette, or like…the pope.)

While I love the idea that divorce is being further destigmatized by sexy cougars dressed like historical Quakers, I smell something fishy here. When the first HDS article was posted in The Guardian, there was literally nothing else online about “Hot Divorcee Summer”, not even a TikTok. And when I read the article, it was incredibly vague in its trend-tracking, and even more so when it comes to identifying what HDS even means. To try and summarise it, HDS is basically just being carefree ‘like a divorcee’. To be specific, it’s about being carefree like this particular photo set of a divorcee:

I really, really don’t want to be a downer because I can imagine this trend bringing joy to someone out there who’s struggling with the idea that divorce means failure or shame. Or some giant-hatted lady just waiting to sue the shit out of her husband. I won’t poke too hard at the idea behind the trend, but I will poke at the idea that it’s a trend to begin with. The Guardian doesn’t lay out any evidence that we’re in a hot divorcee summer besides some tangents about Miss Havisham and cats (“They are quite divorcee energy, in fact; they were never brat (dogs were brat).”) Like a lot of trend forecasting, Hot Divorcee Summer seems to have appeared to its oracles in a dream.

While the present contains some seeds of the future, we can assume that the seeds of HDS were planted not by divorced mums who want to shake ass on a yacht but rather by brands who got tired of marketing to broke Gen Zs. The wedding industry makes billions of dollars annually. Imagine if you could replicate those major purchases (rings, parties, gowns, holidays) again for yet another emotionally-charged life milestone, experienced by a far more financially stable demographic?

I realise I’m not picking up on anything new with the fact that trends, especially Hot Noun Summer trends, are profitable (lol). But I’m just struck by how surreal it felt to see one being manufactured in real time. There was nothing about this trend online until The Guardian declared that “hot divorcee energy … seems to have captured the cultural moment this summer”! Now they’re talking about it on The View! To quote Adam Aleksic, “I wish we could all just touch grass, but that won’t be enough when our offline reality is culturally downstream of the algorithm.”

Anyway, someone told me it’s Hot Paid Subscriber Summer this year. ;-)

I felt genuinely kidnapped by this final season of Euphoria. Every week, I tuned in with my boyfriend to knowingly have a bad time. Sometimes we’d watch it with a four cheeses pizza, and the combined potency of the pizza grease and Sam Levinson’s oily fingerprints left me leaping up at the end of each episode with the violent urge to wash my hands with paint stripper. (Sam Levinson’s probably jumping out of a bush yelling, “DID SOMEONE SAY STRIPPER??”)