Tomato Girl Summer and the Impulse to Classify
One of my favorite pre-bedtime rituals is the infinite TikTok scroll. On one particular night, I watched a home cook bring out five pounds of heirloom tomatoes. She sliced into them with chef-like dexterity. While layering the slices onto a sandwich, her voice-over said, “I’ve got 99 problems but a tomato ain’t one,” as she continued to ramble on about the ills of dating and having a “Tomato Girl Summer.”
As I get older, I find myself becoming increasingly out of sync with the subtleties of pop culture. In this case, Tomato Girl. Tomato girls, as it turns out, are girls who wear things like espadrilles, retro scarves, full-length sundresses à la Sophia Loren and eat food like tinned fish, olives, and of course, tomatoes. I add this classification to my mental inventory of other identity markers, which has grown to include fairycore, blokettecore, and gorpcore — the increasingly obscure list grows longer. I try to avoid whipping out the metaphorical soapbox and curmudgeonly cane, but it seems like trends cycled at a slower pace when I was a teenager. In the 2010s, one was either a Belieber or a Directioner.
Indeed, before the rise of fine-tuned algorithms and the surge of social media platforms that use them, it was simply not possible to churn out the sheer volume of content and categorization that we presently see online. The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent turn from real-life interactions to digital marked schemes created a noticeable shift in individual and institutional world-building, but this cultural fracturing also has its roots in the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher era.
Globalization has turned the consumer into a commodity. Boiling our identities down to consumable objects attached to categorizations like balletcore makes the heavy lifting of advertising for brand name companies quite light. For only $90, you too can buy a pair of Adidas Sambas and be a hot Lower East Side girl! The appeal of selling not just your labor, but also your own self as a “brand” quickly becomes apparent when surveying the influencer landscape. Even micro-influencers (think Pinkydoll) can make it big and live in the lap of designer luxury, even if this luxury is a product of the unacknowledged labor of constantly branding yourself.
As theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi argued in his seminal work After the Future, we are all being overworked and overstimulated. Where is the glamour in life? Hard to say. Alluring as it is to romanticize my tired little slice of toast vis-à-vis eponymous Tomato Girl vegetable of the summer, there are some problems in life that tomatoes just can’t fix.