Plinth

Of course, youth and femininity have long been strange bedfellows, forced together in an uneasy, anxious union. In her 1972 essay, The Double Standard of Aging, Susan Sontag wrote that women 'are old as soon as they are no longer very young', and ageing 'is a crisis that never exhausts itself, because the anxiety is never really used up.' As such, the work of being young is an inexhaustible task. Youth is in crisis; youth that is a strange, uncanny construct with anxiety at its core, demanding to be worked on. Essentially, the youth that the current moment deifies is a youth that has gone haywire – a 'youth' that has become detached from age; from reality. Youth not as fact, but as fiction. Twenty-five year olds get 'baby Botox,' thirteen year olds raid Sephora for expensive anti-aging creams. And my fellow millennials, we plead that this pervasive anxiety around ageing goes deeper than aesthetics – our prolonged adolescence a symptom of prolonged political and economic turbulence, which has manifested as stagnation. Across the spectrum of lower-to-mid-life, the same questions seem to circle: How do we grow up these days? How old are we really?

Around the same time I was poring over Miranda July’s exposition on menopause and mortality, I kept hearing these questions uttered from a source that at first seemed unlikely, then, on reflection, entirely fitting. 'Am I acting my age now?' Billie Eilish sings on the first track of her latest album: 'Am I already on the way out?' At just 22 has Eilish realised she is 'no longer very young'? Or, in this song about missing the 'old me,' is she afraid of having failed to never stop working at her own novelty; her newness; her youth? Has she grown up, or is she ‘over the hill’? In two whispered lines, Eilish reveals that femininity’s core affect now operates at the core of youth too; the imperative to ceaselessly work on femininity 'really just' a demand to never stop working on youth. What an impossible drag, but who better to voice it than the prime Gen Z avatar for anxiety itself.

Fame has long been likened to a freezing process, with celebrities held at the emotional age and maturity they were when it first touched them. Perhaps Eilish’s age-related anxiety is understandable then, given she was just 14 when she released her debut single. In pop, eight years really is a lifetime. Yet, the infantilizing power of fame can also be perceived in society at large, as the traditional trappings of adulthood are pulled out from under the feet of the nearly-not-young like a sly trapdoor, sending them into a free fall that is also a freezing (just as political and economic turbulence can manifest as stagnation).

8ball’s Sean Monahan considers this curious state of affairs in a recent trend report, where he digs into 'the aesthetic trajectory of our current moment'. And, it seems, this 'trajectory' may in fact be a loop, or, more accurately, a treadmill. 'As we age, the meta of the social status games becomes money rather than style,' Monahan writes. 'When you’re young you express yourself with your clothes. When you’re old, you express yourself with your house.' But, when houses are unattainable – held out like a perpetual carrot encouraging the young to gallop to neoliberalism’s tune – the circularity of style can be an expression too: of prolonged adolescence. The future is cancelled. Adulthood is called off. 'For millennials, the most economically anxious demographic of the moment, the implosion of formal status codes presents a problem,' Monahan muses. 'To freeze yourself in time, style and all, is the obvious choice. The ideal is to remain the same, but with more money. Youth and beauty are more important indicators than clothes could ever be. The rich have plastic surgery, trainers, GLP-1 agonists, and more. We have commodified the previously uncommodifiable.'

In our anachronistic age, youth is the highest currency. And, just as the rich dodge tax, so too are they able to dodge mortality – the outward signs of it, at least. On the red carpet and the silver screen the celebrity class grimace, their faces frozen, tight and unlined. And trickle-down economics seems to work in the case of this currency. 'Preventative' treatments and ‘tweakments’ have never been so popular, from the A-list all the way down. With all these bodily modifications and life-cycle interventions on offer, it’s hardly a surprise that the whole concept of ageing is getting scrambled. In the era of 'Instagram face', it seems we have forgotten what 'ageing naturally' even means. 27-year-old Kylie Jenner is ageing terribly, anonymous accounts on the internet declare, but Miley Cyrus is, apparently, 'the definition of ‘aged like fine wine’.' Cyrus is 31 (and, it has to be said, certainly no stranger to cosmetic intervention). Increasingly, age seems to have detached from its biological meaning, becoming a free floating signifier. 'one thing they dont tell u abt turning 23 is that suddenly its too late for everything,' a recent viral tweet declared: 'too late to pursue ur dreams, too late to take those risks, too late to be in love, too late to for quite literally everything. life ends at 22 and ure only left with regrets and longings'. This was a joke, of course, but it was also a perfect catalyst. 'people mocking this but it’s true,' the writer Beth McColl quote tweeted, for instance: 'luckily it only lasts until you’re 26, which is a much younger age than 23. few similar problems arise at 29 but then you’re suddenly 31 & a newborn all over again'. A light-hearted notion, but not a new one – I’ve seen countless ‘takes’ all parroting out the same idea that 29 is ‘older’ than 31, according to a vague system associating age more with vibe than anything else.

Similarly, for weeks on TikTok, millennials and Gen Z did battle by video, as each claimed to be ageing ‘better’ than the other. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that no one is ageing 'normally'. 'Why don’t millennials age?' has over 19.4 million views on TikTok, a Youtube video titled Did People Used to Look Older? has over 17 million views, and articles regularly pop up claiming, with an air of scientific fact, that Gen Z are indeed ageing quicker thanks to vapes, and, ironically, fillers and excessive retinol use. The whole thing starts to look like a curious, contemporary version of The Picture of Dorian Grey, with forty-somethings donning streetwear and dungaree dresses, and 22-year-olds slathering on anti-ageing treatments that only hasten the onset of decline. 'I'm 59 but have a biological age of 21,' a woman proclaimed on the cover of The Times magazine in mid-August: 'here's how I did it'.

Contemporary culture’s anxious fixation with ageing has been turned into a concept; a commodity; a totem held at a remove; a true fetish. Looked at in conjunction with the fashion industry’s use of kid models (Coco Pink Princess for Ivy Park; North West for Fendi), and the 'coquette', 'blokette', 'Barbiecore' and – I kid you not – 'Kidcore' aesthetics (which, after all, is how these fashion images and 'aesthetics' emerge on our feeds, in constant mash-up), it seems clear that this fixation is not simply about being or looking 'old,' but a twisted and all-encompassing complex of anxieties about femininity, youth, nostalgia and novelty, and the ceaseless maintenance work these cultural scripts demand.

Having 'commodified the previously uncommodifiable' youth is no longer natural, but a product of cultural and political contexts, able to be constructed, performed and bought. Again, this is youth as fiction and drag. Yet, it is a tiresome drag; drag without play or pleasure. Youth may become detached from age, as femininity has been uncoupled from sex, but we all die in the end. Or is deathliness next to godliness in this new cultural realm? After all, dreaming of ‘remaining the same’ does not mean yearning to be young, but ageless. It feels horribly apt that Monahan titles his report section 'zombie trends': the contemporary fixation on remaining ageless renders culture undead, but not fully living either; in a 'crisis that never exhausts itself'; moving and yet staying still. Perhaps then a better avatar for our scrambled times than anxious Billie Eilish or Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance is the all too real example of Bryan Johnson pumping himself with his son’s blood – becoming a vampiric feedback loop, living out a fantasy of stasis, where only the rich die young.

By Eloise Hendy