That’s what I remember wearing at her age too. I didn’t really think much of the big t-shirts and sweatshirts. We met up with friends of ours and their daughter was wearing almost an identical hoodie with the hood up and hair dangling as well. Then she put the hood up with her long wavy hair hanging out the front and kept it like that for the rest of the night. “Let me get you a sweatshirt that fits from your closet.” I couldn’t even see that she was wearing shorts underneath. “That things is huge,” I told her when she put it on to go out to dinner. “Sure, you can keep it, ” Grammy said, when Mazzy made the request. She fell in love with Grammy’s black hoodie that she left behind at our house one weekend. Next, I noticed she started gravitating towards longer boxier t-shirts and over-sized sweatshirts, with an emphasis on tie-dye, ombre and anything with the name of a location written on it. Then she asked to buy assorted jibits (slices of cake, avocados, ladybugs, etc.) which made the Croc excitement more understandable. But maybe peach is different? I didn’t ask. After much drama about ombre Crocs that were out of stock (oh, the horror), she picked a peach pair, which was surprising because Mazzy hates pink.

She really looks like she didn’t think about it. Her aesthetic is “I just threw this on and didn’t think about it.” And not in an effortlessly chic way. Then, when we were selecting a pair online, she got excited to a level that was really atypical for her. I was actually thrilled because she has refused to wear anything but dirty athletic sneakers for the past three years. When Mazzy came home from sleep-away camp this summer, she asked me to buy her a pair of Crocs. Then I started to notice some subtle fashion changes. She said “VSCO Girl” was the new “Tumber Girl.” There are no “likes,” so it’s perceived as a platform with less social pressure than Instagram. She told me that VSCO actually has a sharing platform now too, where people cultivate a certain aesthetic. I knew VSCO as the photo editing app and asked Allie about it. The first time I heard the word VSCO girl (pronounced Vis-co) was when Mazzy (age 9) was talking to one of her friends over FaceTime. I care about this new trend, because, you see, I am beginning to suspect that I have a VSCO girl living inside my own home. But I’m not writing about VSCO girls because I feel old and out of touch and unable to grasp a trend that doesn’t include me, like most of the articles I’ve read. I could feel her secondhand embarrassment emanating through the phone when I told her I was going to write this article.

The term “VSCO girl” seems to have entered into mainstream discourse a few weeks ago, but according to Allie, my 25 year-old co-worker, it’s actually been around a lot longer than that, and I am incredibly late to the game.

I check date on vsco image