Is It Still “Kinda Chic” to Say the Word “Chic”? 

Good Morning, Mr. Orwell

The world on New Year’s Eve going into 1984, dear reader, was vastly different from the world George Orwell had imagined in his book, 1984. 

The ball that dropped on the Big Apple that night, for one, was shaped exactly like, well, a big apple (but to be fair, it was big). Hermès was hard at work harnessing Jane Birkin’s bubbling, babbling brilliance in bag form (though its final finished fabrication was still a good two years away). 

And Billboard’s #1 song in the US was Say Say Say by Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson; it’s opening lyric, “Say, say, say what you want, but don’t play games with my affection,” might as well have been saying, saying, saying of the games of affection Hermès itself would play in the years to come.

Nonetheless, a far cry from the Stalinist spectacle of totalitarian superstatedom Orwell had envisioned: one where the omnipresent onslaught of screens and state surveillance rendered rational thinking a thoughtcrime. 

Also read: 2026.

Therefore, as a befitting rebuttal to George Orwell’s dystopian delusions – technicolor consumerism had saved us, hurrah! – on the NYE of 1984, avant garde video artist Nam June Paik aired Good Morning, Mr. Orwell: a live, international satellite telethon telecast to over 25 million viewers worldwide.

And it is on Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, in front of the largest live audience art had ever witnessed, that German artist Joseph Beuys unveiled the Orwell Leg. 

Now, the Orwell Leg, at its core, wasn’t all that interesting of a proposition: it was an ordinary pair of everyday jeans – the garment pretty much everybody on earth owns – slit open at the hem and wedged in with a slice of denim to flare out wider. What made it interesting, however, was what Beuys did: he took the object with arguably the least aura on Earth, altered it by hand, and made it entirely his own. It was a true one-of-one – rare and luxurious.

And then, he made 34 more, replicating and reproducing the exact alteration (even instructing those watching to make their own pair at home), and in the process, refusing to grant the piece the exclusivity of a one-off. 

It was strangely democratic; one of Orwell’s 35 original Legs currently sits on display at the Brooklyn Museum right now!

It was also, if I may say so myself, kinda chic.

Chic Happens

There’s an incredible image of an attendee outside the Loewe Spring/Summer 2027 show that’s permanently seared into my brain. 

Underneath their cropped orange Chanel boucle coat, they have on a tattered white tee cut just so to reveal a sliver of a tatted pelvis, giving way to a pair of paint-splattered, loose Levi’s, not so much as ripped, but rather mauled and mutilated, its deep gashes revealing yet more tattoos. For footwear, they’re sporting a pair of leopard lace-up sneakers. And dangling from their fingers is truly the most beat-up, battered and blistered Hermès Kelly you can imagine.

I can’t see this person’s face. I don’t even know if they’re going to the Loewe presentation at all. Yet it is somehow this nameless, faceless figure of indeterminate age and orientation that stands out more to me than the ladies and gentlemen in head-to-toe Loewe ensembles of artfully untucked shirts and spotless pristine Amazona 180 bags louchely slouched open.

And it is, dear reader, this incredible, ineffable, and near-indistinguishable characteristic that I’ve come to deem chic. Or at least, chic to me. 

Because the notion of chic itself is singularly subjective. 

Even the word’s origins carry with it an air of chic mystery: some label it a loanword from the French, along the veins of couture and crème (Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) used the word ‘chicard’ as Parisian slang for someone stylish but un-bourgeois.) Others attribute its ancestry to the German word “Schick” meaning ‘proper,’ ‘skill,’ or ‘aptness.’ 

Today, Parisian women, the Olsen twins, the color black, peeling a cold orange, Joan Didion, blank leather notebooks, turtlenecks and Jeff Goldblum are among the handful of things universally agreed upon as chic. 

But beyond that? It’s all fair game.

Tongue-in-Chic

“Francis Bacon is chic,” quips I-D, as is being happy, “according to the notoriously unhappy-about-everything Daily Mail.” “Baking is CHIC. Boring is CHIC. Being online is CHIC. Being offline, and showing it online, is CHIC,” Rachel Weisz writes. Plus-size influencer MariaBegins, one of chic’s earliest instigators, posted, “Kinda chic posting myself online despite the hate comments I receive.” Drew Barrymore followed up with, “kinda chic to be in your 50s.” Ashley Graham captioned under an image of her on the Victoria’s Secret catwalk: “kinda chic to know cellulite never held you back”. 

The list keeps going: while one user on TikTok touts, “Kinda chic to call the Upper East side home,” another proclaims, “Kinda chic to make all your big decisions in the bath.” Supermarket chain Aldi made said big decisions easier with “Kinda chic to sell a foldable sock hanger by the wine.”

Baudelaire (“the 19th century’s Nicky Haslam,” writes The Guardian, “given how many things he disapproved of: photography, Belgium, Victor Hugo”) called chic an “awful and bizarre word”. Larry Flynt in 1976 titled his porno magazine Chic. The ’90s gave us ‘model chic’, ‘heroin chic’ and Prada’s ‘ugly chic’. At the turn of the century, chic gave way to ‘boho chic’ and ‘geek chic’. 

Today, chic is much more democratic, and pretty much anything and everything that can be overlaid in butter yellow font checks out. “As with anything,” explains writer and columnist, Tom Rasmussen, “chic is often defined today by what is not chic” (I-D’s roundup of unchic things include working five days a week, trying to buy a house, Lime Bikes, Instagram pastel infographics, God Save the King, and asking “can I pay contactless?”) 

“Chic!” cries Daniel Day-Lewis as the bratty British designer Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread (2017), “Whoever invented that ought to be spanked in public. I don’t even know what that word means!”

Honestly, I’m not sure if I do anymore either.

One Chic Fits For All?

The painting Suburbs of a Paranoiac-critical Town: Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History (1936) depicts a scene of surrealist disturbia by Salvador Dalí. Its genius lies not in the technique of the art itself, but within the viewer who happens to gaze upon it once, then twice, then a third time, only to have the landscapes dissolve and the lines blur and the mind boggle. 

Essentially, the piece evokes in the passersby a sense of dread: the more you look at it, the less you understand. Why is Dalí’s wife Gala offering you grapes? Why are the outskirts of European history so… barren? Am I watching them… or are they watching me? One can’t quite help but wonder.

Weirdly, it’s that same sense of inexplicable dread that creeps up on you the more you engage in the chic discourse. “I have been noticing something on instagram for a few months that I couldn’t quite yet articulate,” writes Berlin-based editor Brenda Weischer, “butter yellow font, kinda chic to, photo ideas for cool girls, where to get inspired outside of pinterest, kinda chic to, wtf is minimalism, topics to write essay on instead of scrolling, kinda chic to, ten habits cool girls do, every day once a week once a month, kinda chic to.”

Weischer calls it “template slop”: where an original idea is rendered unoriginal by sheer widespread use (Stalin again: “quantity has a quality of its own.”) Emily Segal of Nemesis, on the contrary, dubs it tasteslop, which she defines as “cultural capital after extraction, after it’s been through the blender.” 

But what gives both template slop and tasteslop – and in the process, chicslop – their borderline uncanny valley quality is that the lack of context that lent taste (and by extension, chic) to them in the first place. 

Consider Beuys’ modified denim concoction – would the Orwell Leg make sense if not for the year (1984), the program (Good Morning, Mr. Orwell) or even the mood (consumerist euphoria)? Similarly, does a sterile reissue of a nostalgic hit (think, the Saint Laurent Mombasa or the Marc Jacobs Stam) induce the same frenzy in the buyer now as it did two decades ago?

What this leaves in its wake is an endless tasteless void of content churning and trends cycling at supersonic speeds, leaving the likes of you and I unable to discern what is real, what is curated, what is generated by the algorithm, and what is actually tasteful. Or, for that matter, deemed chic.

The word “chic”, therefore, is only its latest victim – the latest of many.