It Girls: Human Icons or Viral Products?

She’s the kind of girl you notice without even meaning to. She’s sitting in a café where everything is beige. She’s sipping matcha from a reusable cup, her hair perfectly styled, her expression unreadable. She doesn’t look rushed. You can’t explain why you’re looking at her—there’s just a stillness around her, even in the background noise. She doesn’t feel present; she feels curated. Like a filter. Like a soft-focus fantasy.

You don’t know what she’s thinking. In fact, you’re not even sure she thinks. She looks familiar—like a Zara campaign or a TikTok you’ve seen a dozen times. Her face doesn’t carry a story, just a vibe. She could be Emma, Léa, Haerin, Sabrina... or simply “@softgirllover99.” She’s everywhere and nowhere. A girl you don’t approach. An image you scroll past.

But what if I told you she might not be real? That the entire idea of the “it girl” has been drained of substance and turned into a recyclable aesthetic? That we’ve stopped talking about real women and started consuming templates? That any of them could be swapped out, and the algorithm wouldn’t flinch?

The it girl today is a portable aesthetic. A clean, sponsor-friendly vibe. A Pinterest board turned human. And the question we never say out loud is this: is there still a soul underneath all that polish? Can an icon still be human? Or have we replaced personality with perfection—and traded soul for branding?

In this episode, we’re breaking the myth apart. We’ll talk about Sabrina Carpenter, Haerin from NewJeans, Zara clones on TikTok, coquette-core, Lana Del Rey, BeReal, and AI influencers. We’ll dig into what’s left beneath the blush and pleated skirts. We’ll talk marketing, desire, algorithms… and the extinction of unpredictability.

Because today, we’re taking a closer look at the girl we see everywhere—without ever really knowing who she is.

The Rise, Fall, and Recycling of the It Girl

There was a time when becoming an it girl was almost accidental. A spark. You didn’t choose it. It wasn’t manufactured. It just happened, because you had that thing—an aura, a style, a kind of charisma wrapped in perceived authenticity. In the 1920s, Clara Bow was the first woman publicly called “The It Girl.” The it wasn’t beauty or fame—it was something magnetic and elusive. She didn’t follow the trends. She was the trend.

The term came back in waves. We had Warhol’s girls, then Paris Hilton, then Alexa Chung. Women who didn’t just define their era—they embodied it while keeping a slight ironic distance. Being an it girl meant being watched, yes—but also being detached from the performance. It was a way of existing in the spotlight without bowing to it. A way of saying, “I’m here, I shine, but I couldn’t care less.” It wasn’t a career path. It was a cultural infection.

Then came social media. And the it girl morphed. She disembodied. She stopped being an organic phenomenon and started becoming a strategic product. The 2000s it girl was messy, unpredictable, inconsistent—human. The 2020s version? She’s a viral aesthetic. Packaged, exported, monetized.

Today, you don’t become an it girl. You construct yourself into one. Every detail—from your hair to your nail color, your Spotify playlists to your Instagram poses—is carefully curated for maximum virality. The so-called “effortless” look now demands full-time effort. Even casual messiness is managed. Those “oh, I just threw this on” outfits? They come straight from Notion moodboards, pre-approved by a stylist and maybe a PR agency. Spontaneity has a rate card now.

What used to be a cultural vibration is now an editorial calendar. The it girl’s look doesn’t say, “I’m different.” It says, “You could be me—if you buy the right products.” And brands know it. Zara, H&M, Shein… they’ve built their empires on replicating this aesthetic. The it girl isn’t a trendsetter anymore. She’s the prototype of a fast-fashion machine. A new one goes viral on TikTok each month, only to be replaced by the next “new” aesthetic. The it girl has become disposable. And that’s when the word “product” starts to feel very literal.

But this isn’t just about style or authenticity. It’s deeper. It’s about how we’ve started processing individuality. Because when you turn a woman into a starter kit, you’re not just killing originality—you’re replacing it with a sales strategy. We don’t admire people anymore. We consume projections. And those projections don’t need souls. They just need to sync with the algorithm.

Coquette-core, TikTok Clones, and the Rise of the Algorithmic Aesthetic

If the first part of this episode broke down how the it girl became a product, what comes next is even more dystopian: she’s not just packaged—she’s duplicated. We’re no longer dealing with icons. We’re dealing with templates. Welcome to the age of the algorithmic aesthetic.

Take coquette-core, for instance. What started as a sugary microtrend—a mix of early 2000s nostalgia, ballet-inspired looks, ribbons, and romantic filters—has now become a full-on identity factory. Enter Sabrina Carpenter. She didn’t invent the trend, but she absorbed it so fully that she’s practically indistinguishable from the aesthetic itself. Her music videos, her wardrobe, her public persona—it all feels like it’s been designed inside a Pinterest board, optimized for maximum “soft girl” appeal. At some point, you stop watching her and start watching the brand of her.

Same logic with Haerin from NewJeans. She’s widely considered one of the most iconic fourth-gen K-pop visuals. But there’s something eerie in how flawlessly composed she is. Her features, her gaze, her styling—it’s like she’s been assembled in a visual lab to perfectly hit every trend curve without a single pixel out of place. Haerin doesn’t just perform—she scans. She exists to register on your feed. She’s designed to trigger aesthetic recognition faster than thought. That’s not fame. That’s formatting.

And then you open TikTok and scroll through hundreds—literally hundreds—of girls who all look exactly like her. Search “Zara girl” and you’ll see what I mean: beige-toned outfits, sleek blowouts, minimal makeup, neutral apartment backgrounds, and that now-standard “unbothered” delivery. They talk the same, pose the same, walk through their day with the same detached softness. Not because they’re copying each other, but because they’re all copying the same idea: the girl the algorithm loves most. The most visible girl is now the least individual one.

The irony is brutal: these girls are supposed to be icons of style. But style has become so codified that it no longer expresses—it replicates. We’ve reached a point where individuality is less valuable than brand compatibility. And that’s what makes the new it girl both everywhere and hollow. She exists to be consumed, not to be understood. She’s not a person you relate to—she’s an atmosphere you apply.

And even rebellion has been turned into a moodboard. “Breaking the mold” has become another predictable subcategory of the same mold. You can now buy “edgy” as easily as you buy “clean girl.” Nothing breaks the system—it just gets filtered into a subtrend.

The question now isn’t “Who are the it girls today?” It’s: “Is it still possible to be someone when the only way to be seen is to become something everyone already recognizes?”

It Girl vs. AI Girl: Perfection Without a Person

At this point, you might still find comfort in thinking there’s a human behind it all. That somewhere beneath each Zara clone, each Haerin-style face, each Sabrina Carpenter looped endlessly on your For You Page—there’s still a body. A voice. A mind that chooses, or at least thinks it does.

But that illusion of someone real fades fast. Because today, an it girl doesn’t even need to be alive to generate attention. She just needs to be consistent.

Lil Miquela. Aitana Lopez. And more recently, those anonymous “AI Girlfriends” flooding sponsored Instagram stories. They’re not anomalies. They’re the logical endpoint. Digitally manufactured figures, perfectly styled, never caught off guard, never out of frame. They don’t age. They don’t sleep. They don’t contradict themselves. They’re always available, always flattering, always perfectly on trend.

And more importantly—they’re fully optimized. Their outfits are engineered for click-through rates. Their captions are crafted for virality. Their emotions are simulated for conversion. They’re it girls without hormones, without doubt, without burnout. It girls who never mess up. And the scary part? It works. Thousands of people comment under their photos as if they're real. Sometimes even knowing they’re not. Because what we crave isn’t humanity. It’s aesthetic consistency.

And it’s not just limited to fully artificial girls. Take BeReal—the app that was supposed to be the antidote to Instagram. One daily notification, no filters, no prep. A beautiful intention, sure. But the execution? BeReal quickly turned into a stage for carefully timed “authenticity.” People delay their post to catch the good lighting. They curate spontaneity. They rehearse realness. What was meant to break the performance became just another version of it.

Even platforms designed to connect us to the “real” end up absorbed by the logic of beauty, cohesion, and branding. Because ultimately, what we expect from an it girl today isn’t a person—it’s a vibe. An atmosphere. An emotional preset that aligns with our playlists, our journaling apps, our Instagram Saved folders.

And if an AI can deliver that without spiraling, without changing aesthetics every six months, without needing a mental health break or a private life… why bother with actual women? Why deal with contradictions, nuance, mood swings, real opinions? The human soul glitches too often for the algorithm’s taste.

And maybe that’s where the real fracture lies. We’re no longer looking for human icons. We’re looking for blank surfaces we can project onto. We don’t want to follow a journey—we want a face that stays the same. A screen that doesn’t break. A presence that doesn’t evolve.

And the smoother the face, the more comforting it feels. The fewer the edges, the less it disrupts. We don’t want to be challenged. We want a stable filter.

But in a world without disruption… is anything still alive?

The Human It Girl: Survivor or Relic?

Amid this army of clones, these algorithm-approved faces—digitally generated or culturally duplicated—a question still lingers: is there any room left for a human it girl today? A real person, with contradictions, awkward phases, bad outfits, weird Instagram posts, charisma-free days, and the occasional styling disaster at 11pm? Is there any space left for the unpredictable? For the kind of individuality that disrupts the algorithm rather than feeding it?

A few names still resist—or at least try to escape the mold. Take Julia Fox. On paper, she checks every it girl box: model, actress, fashion experiment incarnate. But she refuses to smooth herself out. She posts raw, sometimes chaotic videos. She talks openly about her struggles, her single motherhood, her complicated relationship with fame. She plays with aesthetics, but never lets them swallow her whole. She’s always one inch away from sabotaging her own image—and that’s exactly what makes her captivating. Because she still exists outside the image. She holds on to opacity. To chaos. To a kind of un-marketability that keeps her human.

In a completely different register, there’s Jennie from BLACKPINK. On the surface, she’s the perfect global it girl—Chanel ambassador, K-pop icon, queen of minimal effort cool. And yet… she resists. She rarely overshares. She smiles halfway. She stays quiet when the world wants a statement. She doesn’t play into fan service, doesn’t perform curated vulnerability, doesn’t bend to the performance of transparency. And in that restraint lies a subtle rebellion: ambiguity as resistance.

But that kind of resistance has become rare. And more importantly—it’s no longer rewarded. The algorithm doesn’t like nuance. It prefers consistency over complexity, repetition over contradiction. It categorizes personalities like it curates playlists. Anything that doesn’t fit the mood? It disappears from your feed.

So, can an it girl still have a soul? The answer is… maybe. But she’ll have to make constant trade-offs with the image economy. She’ll have to accept losing virality in exchange for truth. She’ll have to settle for slower, blurrier, more unstable visibility. She’ll have to reject templates. Embrace the off-days. It’s possible. But it’s expensive. And in a world obsessed with self-optimization, it’s practically revolutionary.

The truth is, the human it girl never disappeared. She just stopped being profitable. She stopped being scalable. She stopped being “useful.” And maybe that’s exactly what makes her valuable again. Not because she’s “authentic”—that word has been turned into marketing copy—but because she’s uncontrollable.

Because she spills over. Because she fails. Because she evolves. And somehow, despite everything… she still exists.

CONCLUSION — The Body, the Glitch, and the Girl Who Comes After

Maybe we’ve spent too long asking what it girls represent, and not enough time asking what we’ve made them carry. Because behind every perfectly curled Sabrina Carpenter, every crystal-eyed Haerin, every beige-toned Zara clone flooding your feed, there’s a system bigger than the individual. We’re no longer following a person—we’re consuming a form.

And that form doesn’t need a backstory. It doesn’t need memories, hangovers, breakdowns, existential dread on a Sunday morning. It doesn’t need doubts or convictions. It doesn’t need a soul. It just needs the right ratio of soft lighting to screen time.

So yes, it girls still exist. But maybe we’ve stopped seeing them as girls. Maybe we’ve turned them into projection surfaces. Comfort objects. Digestible icons for a culture that’s too overstimulated to handle anything messy, noisy, or alive. Maybe we don’t want real girls anymore. We want avatars—bright enough to desire, but not so real they make us uncomfortable.

But a soul? A real one? That still causes problems. It breaks the interface. It lingers in the silences. It laughs at the wrong time. It throws off the algorithm.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s exactly where the next real it girl will emerge. Not the one you scroll past without thinking, but the one who disrupts your feed. The one who glitches.

A real girl.Not a fantasy. Not a template. Not a trend.An anomaly.

And if you ever feel too alive for the filters, too glitchy for the standards—then welcome. You’re in the right place.

This is Cappuccino & Croissant, where icons are dissected, trends deconstructed, and even AI sometimes have a mood swing.

If this episode challenged you, disturbed you, or made you think—share it.And if you want to go deeper into those fractures between image, identity, and becoming— go listen to my two new EPs, En construction and Underconstruction, out now on all streaming platforms.

And if you’re not sure which one to start with… choose the one that makes you feel slightly off-balance. That might just be the real luxury now