It both calms me and pains me, the home of the Berenstain Bears. A modest detached property, one room on each floor, built sensitively into the trunk and wide green branches of a tree. There are wooden steps leading up to the front door, and the window shutters are painted pink, and it sits in a vast empty field, surrounded by mountains. As my little son idles on my lap and we read about the bears’ multiple failed picnics, these days I often feel myself being dragged there, through the paper, which smells of bread, into the field, printed long ago in ink, and to the treehouse, where I would perhaps hibernate under some sort of homemade quilt.
This impulse, this need to escape, to a magical world of softness that gives off its own light, is something I see reflected online. It’s partly seasonal, but it’s also I think, a reaction to what came before, as most things seem to be. Rather than girl bosses or hot girls, women on social media currently aspire to be, largely, middle-aged mice getting cosy in a tiny bed. Or woodland creatures snuggling into a chair made of a nutshell, or something adorable sheltering under a cookie. Twee – the aesthetic last popular in the early 2000s, its signature accessories cardigans and berets, its queen Zooey Deschanel and her fellow Manic Pixie Dream Girls – has returned. TikTok (nostalgia-machine and home of every microtrend) thrums with twee fashion, with its precious whimsy and ukeleles and corduroy and girliness – it’s back, but this time its lazy.
In a conversation with Self Esteem’s Rebecca Taylor on her podcast Sentimental Garbage, Caroline O’Donoghue reconsidered the twee-ness of their shared youth, when the macho music press saw in Taylor’s earlier nu-folk-ish band Slow Club “a lack of meanness, a lack of cruelty,” and read it as “inherent weakness”. In her little dresses, using a chair as a drum kit, baking cakes for the audience, Taylor embraced twee as a refuge from the sexiness of contemporary culture: “It was something quite conservative, but it felt radical and clever.” She wasn’t ready, she added, to be a grown-up. If twee fashion is a response to a hyper-sexed time that went before (in the 2000s, girls were coming of age in the shadow of celebrity sex tapes, a decade of baby-oiled limbs and very high heels – I did permanent damage to my feet with the stilettos that were part of my shopgirl uniform), then its modern incarnation is reacting not only to the recent mainstreaming of sex, with “hot girl summer” and Love Island bikinis and the rise and fall of bottoms, but to hustle culture. To a life lived for work, a life where you must also bloody love it.
“Stop glamourising the grind,” one meme goes, above a picture of 12 mice having a pillow fight, or Winnie the Pooh with a mug of cocoa, or a kitten eating a picnic, “and glamourise whatever this is.” Posts featuring the gentle animals from half-remembered story books abound – removed from their context these furry boys become iconic inspirational kings, living well in their cabin of twigs. Toads staunchly refuse to get out of their beds until proof of spring. Little owls send the winters from their homes. Where the 2000s had Alexa Chung and Zooey Deschanel, today the internet has a very smart rabbit snuggling in watercolours. Here is the dream. The new twee dream.
People are sleepy, it turns out. People no longer want to work nonstop in unstable jobs with wages that barely cover rent, let alone heating bills. That thing they called “quiet quitting” (simply: not doing more work than you get paid for) has morphed into a new sort of twee, which romanticises its innocent laziness. “Last week,” wrote comedian Caleb Hearon on Twitter, going instantly viral, “somebody suggested 9am to me as a meeting time and I laughed out loud. This is not the navy bitch, 9am is still snug as a bug in a rug hours. Please be serious.” I repeat this often now, “snug as a bug in a rug hours,” and it has come to mean anytime the sun is low or absent, or when the rain comes, or when I double cardigan.
As the world has changed, getting hotter but feeling colder, many of us have folded our ambitions into a smaller and smaller square, so that now we no longer yearn for fast cars or luxury resorts, instead, just a cosy little burrow we can call our own. A handful of berries maybe, somewhere to sharpen our teeth. The new twee asks for the very least, the very very least – it offers a nostalgic regression back through girlhood, with its naivety and A-line skirts, and thick-rimmed glasses, and then further, into her imaginary land of gentleness and bliss, where one’s only responsibility is to gather enough nuts for the winter and maybe fashion a little waistcoat out of leaves, for best.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
