Stand down Stacey Solomon; hush, quiet luxury: mess is back, though in this household, and I suspect many others, it never went away. “Messiness in all its aesthetic glory is being celebrated in a meaningful way,” Susie Lau writes in this month’s Elle, highlighting some recent fashion mess – dirty shirt cuffs and frayed embroidery at Prada; battered handbags at Chanel; an “extreme-treated denim” homage to the walk of shame at Diesel. Beauty and homes are on a similar trajectory, apparently, with morning-after makeup and interiors that make a virtue of clutter and imperfection, “from unmade beds to breakfast leftovers”.
The mess revival Lau observes in style has also been gathering momentum in other areas: goblin mode, bed rotting and sloppy, blurred Instagram photo dumps. Now “gen Z is drinking again” (74% of them, up from 66% in 2023 according to a drinks industry study), there seems to be a broader sobriety backlash brewing and cigarettes are, depressingly, back in fashion (deployed as accessories by Kylie Jenner, Dua Lipa, Hailey Bieber and many more).
All my clothes are stained and crumpled and the clutter in my house is so over the top I think it might be load-bearing: I should be thrilled by this moment. I’m certainly delighted that, as Lau observes, resistance to the smooth-edged, uncanny aesthetics of AI tasteslop and cleaner-than-thou self-optimisation is ramping up. Please don’t tell me about your microbiome – it’s so annoying it’s messing up my parasympathetic nervous system. But instead, I find myself thinking there’s mess and mess, and the boring kind is never cool.
Because while the aesthetics of mess, the performance of it, have become acceptable, even aspirational, I don’t think we’re any more tolerant of the real mess of life. Sexy dishevelment, visual signifiers of a wild night, an online breadcrumb trail of exciting unravelling, a curated tablescape of mismatched crockery, spills and stubbed-out cigs – chic. But being broke, hurting, feeling unable to cope, being too unwell or unhappy to do the dishes, or to wash? Still decidedly unchic.
It’s something Kathryn Jezer-Morton pointed out in the Cut recently, in a piece on how struggling is the last social media taboo. “There are few if any accessible scripts for our ambivalent feelings and our everyday confusion,” Jezer-Morton writes, noting how breakups, illness, money troubles and other properly painful stuff tends only to be aired online after the event, or handled with polished, almost-corporate restraint, finessed into upbeat narratives of progress and personal growth (or, I would add, metabolised into glib, palatably fun content).
Jezer-Morton sees this partly as a byproduct of personal brand building (especially as a wobbly economy makes presenting a polished version of yourself feel like a fiscal imperative). It’s also about how social media spaces don’t feel safe. Showing the pale underbelly of your real mess is exposing, and who wants Meta and the rest of the tech bros data harvesting their vulnerability?
In the fragmented wild west of TikTok and obscurer corners of Substack, there are pockets of rawer realness – people struggling day-to-day with chronic illness, poor mental health or lack of money, without a neat redemption arc – but most of the current mess renaissance feels about as authentic as intentionally distressed denim. It’s probably naive to imagine showing genuine mess – literal or figurative – online is even an option, but I’m a veteran of the early internet, when we did exactly that, probably unwisely. Now I’ve retreated, like everyone else, into posting bland pictures of pets and plants rather than the used interdental brushes and unpaid bills on my desk. Uncomfortable feelings get elliptical vague-posts at most; more often silence.
Because life is messy in repetitive, unglamorous ways that don’t make us look good. Can that ever be cool? Stranger things have happened. After all, fashion can make anything desirable: a DHL uniform T-shirt for £185; experimental Japanese garments that make the wearer look like a Louise Bourgeois spider trapped in a bin bag. But I suppose the danger is that if tastemakers made grubby, humdrum, untidy lives cool, they’d soon have to make them uncool again. I’d love ordinary mess to become timelessly chic, like a crisp white shirt, but I fear that’s about as likely as me keeping one clean.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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