Girlhood has evolved, and in place of Barbie and bows comes Brat and cigarettes. While the aesthetic has changed, the message remains the same, and women continue to reinvent themselves stylistically to make the act of being alive and being an adult bearable.
Last summer, innocence was all the rage. Thanks to movies like Poor Things and Barbie, the ideal woman was portrayed as naïve and doll-like, dressed in shades of pink and pastels as she discovered the world. This summer, the monoculture was defined mostly by music, especially Charli XCX’s album Brat, and with it, a shift in what it means to be a girl. It’s still so confusing, but we’re no longer naïve, even if we want to seem that way. To be a girl now is to be a Dimes Square archetype: someone trashier, darker, and, ultimately, cooler. And nothing says that more than a cross draped across our collarbones, an ironic good-girl accessory layered over our bad-girl looks.
The thesis statement for this trend comes in the second verse of Charli XCX’s “Mean Girls”: “It’s 4 a.m. and she’s out there / With the razor-sharp tongue stuck to skinny cigarettes / Calls him “Daddy” while she’s fingering a gold cross / And she’s kinda fucked up, but she’s still in Vogue.” Within a few verses, she’s laid out an anthem to that girl we rotate between hating and wanting to be, but the image of her “fingering a gold cross” seems to contradict it all. In an interview with The Face, Charli explained the inspiration for the song came partly from Dasha Nekrasova, the host of a controversial podcast show that lands on the ears of New York’s downtown crowd. In a 2022 New York Times op-ed that declared the Catholic Church the hottest club in the city, Nekrasova was cited as a driving force behind the rise of young people’s interest in the aesthetics of the religion as a larger cultural shift.
It’s only fitting that the simple gold cross is gaining popularity, as bigger and bolder religious symbols have been steadily turning mainstream over the last few years. Crosses can be spotted in Lana Del Rey’s Interview cover, Rosalía’s music video for “Vampiros,” and Reneé Rapp’s Coachella performance. The Catholic Church was the backdrop for the “Feather” music video by Sabrina Carpenter, an artist whose whole aesthetic plays on the “good girl next door” façade. Meanwhile, on the runways of Thom Browne’s fall 2024 show and Dior’s Resort collection, the themes were darker and more punk-inspired, hinting at the gothic revival in fashion first teased by Netflix’s Wednesday. And on red carpets, celebrities continued to be playful with an array of cross jewelry: Stars like Chappell Roan, Camila Cabello, and GloRilla all wore them in very different ways to the 2024 Video Music Awards; Yseult wore it to the 2024 CFDA Awards; and most recently, Kim Kardashian wore Princess Diana’s $200,000 amethyst necklace to the 2024 LACMA Gala.
Maybe the most on-theme use of a cross in pop culture right now comes from Addison Rae, the summer’s unexpected pop princess. Her insanely popular single this summer called “Diet Pepsi” includes lyrics like, “My boy’s a winner, he loves the game / My lips reflect off his cross gold chain / I like the way he’s telling me / My ass looks good in these ripped blue jeans.”
Rae has not been shy about sharing her admiration for Britney Spears, and the lyrics of “Diet Pepsi” are further proof that she’s following in Spears’s footsteps, especially when it comes to invoking a good-girl-gone-bad persona, but with a more modern twist. Instead of hiding under the cross, it’s used as a crucial callout to the downtown-tradcath aesthetic Rae is hoping to conjure.
In Challengers, one of the biggest and sexiest movies of the year, the fascination with a mean girl cosplaying as good continues. The clothing worn by our protagonist played by Zendaya throughout the film is a clear indicator of her growth, from the juvenile athleticwear of her youth to the head-to-toe designer labels of her adulthood. However, the singular constant throughout her journey is a simple gold chain and cross, one that is visible throughout the major moments of the film even as she waffles between two men, manipulating them both, and ending up, to some, the villain.
And once you see these crosses, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to stop. Recently, on my way to secure an afternoon soda in the office, I bumped into a co-worker I hadn’t seen for a few months. She had a silver chain with a chunky cross around her neck. I asked her if she was religious and then immediately backtracked. “No, it’s Laura Lombardi. She’s a cool downtown artist,” she said. “I got it for a wedding in a fun Italian way,” she explained, hinting that she understood the implications of wearing the religious symbol around her neck. What others would mistake as an innocent piece of jewelry I knew had a different meaning, if not any less complicated. It was something to bear, after all.