ZEITGEIST

Girlies forever

IS IT TIME FOR THE GIRLIES TO GROW UP, OR IS THE GIRLIE A NEW TYPE OF GROWN-UP?

WORDS BY ALEXANDRA ENGLISH

You know a girlie when you see one: on the bus, walking down the street, at a cafe. There’s no uniform; it’s a vibe. It’s not about gender; it’s an aura. To know a girlie is to be one. Girlies communicate in dog-whistles, winks and imperceptible secret handshakes.

A girlie is not a literal girl — she’s an adult woman. She’s probably in her twenties or thirties but might be in her fifties or sixties; she could be a married mother who owns a home, or she might be single and spending her disposable income on designer fashion, manicures and dirty martinis. A girlie can be straight or gay or pan- or a-sexual, or any number of identifications. A girlie can be a guy, but the girlies must anoint him; he cannot and must not impose the label on himself. (This is possibly the one rule of girlhood, an otherwise lawless state of being.)

To be a girlie is to be part of an in-joke, a member of an exclusive yet inclusive club that demarcates itself from the seriousness of adulthood by embracing girlhood in all its silliness and frivolity and little treats while also priding itself on independence, intelligence and political awareness. To be a girlie is to be a contradiction, it’s to contain — as they say — multitudes.

Girlie (noun) doesn’t necessarily mean girly (verb). It’s not all pink and glittery: there’s an avenue of girlhood for every type of woman. Girlhood is limitless. “All facets of girlhood are being celebrated, in whatever way that looks for you,” says Dr Brittany Ferdinands, a card-carrying girlie and lecturer in digital content creation at The University of Sydney. “I honestly have never felt more connected to other women than I have lately.”

For some, girlhood is a life stage, for some it’s a lifestyle, and for others it’s a trend. But unlike TikTok’s micro-trends that last all of 24 hours, girlhood has proven to have staying power. “It started with Megan Thee Stallion’s song ‘Hot Girl Summer’ in 2019, and then popped off in 2023,” Ferdinands says. She’s referring to the moment when Barbie and Taylor Swift’s

Eras Tour collided, unleashing such a global frenzy of girlhood that the reverberations are still being felt in 2025. “It was this incredible collective celebration of girlhood that became such a big cultural moment that it permeated the mainstream,” she says.

We know girls have always been the head of cultural change. Now they’re being acknowledged and celebrated. “Female interests have always been dismissed as frivolous, so girls became this counter culture,” Ferdinands says. “Now they’re the dominant culture. There’s so much power there. They have run the economy from their interests forever, even though they are not taken seriously.” Being a girl finally carries both cultural and literal capital.