I 💓 Internet It Girls
a love letter
“Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.”
-Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
Happy V-Day, girls! As a Pisces through and through, Valentine’s Day is one of my favorite holidays. Because not only do I love love — I love yearning and pursuing and obsessing. So, what better way to celebrate than by writing a little love letter to all the girls online who I can’t stop thinking about?
I got this idea from obsessively watching Lindsey Louise’s series on TikTok about Internet It Girls. Lindsey, who also writes the brilliant
, has been carefully documenting the girls who made the Internet back in the days of MySpace, Livejournal, and even lookbook.nu.And these early Internet It Girls got me wondering: what does it take to be an It Girl now? Now that we have a little window into everyone’s lives at all times, now that nothing is really that hidden or hard to find, is the It Girl a dying breed?
In my diary a bunch of years ago, I wrote down this Harmony Korine quote about how it’s hard to get lost in America anymore. We know where we are all the time now. And It Girls are kind of like that, too. Before now, no matter how famous she got, how much in the public eye she was thrust, it seems to me that part of what made an It Girl was an unanswered question: who is she?
But now, it’s hard not to know exactly who someone is because we’re uploading our lives to the Internet all the time.
As much as we knew about an It Girl’s biography, she also seemed to appear out of nowhere. An object of our obsession for a moment, a girl we were fascinated with for a lifetime. This strange kind of celebrity surpasses merely being visible: captured by photogs and paparazzi, poured into advertisements and magazine covers and branded social media posts. Instead, It Girls are something in the air. And they never really leave even when they’re gone because their tastes are so strange, their expression so fully their own, that they create a culture, a style, a way of being that surpasses their time and place.
It’s hard to maintain that ineffable quality that makes girls it. But some girls still do. And in this issue of Internet Bedroom, I’m gonna introduce you to a few of my favorite Internet It Girls of 2024.
Fashion: Victoria Zozimo (@v.zozimo)
I thank whatever algorithm brought me to Victoria Zozimo because as soon as I saw her in my feed, I knew she was It.
There are so many things I love about Victoria’s style. How she blends kawaii and Lolita styles from Japan with Y2k trends in a way that feels completely authentic to her. How she she is unafraid to reuse core pieces of her wardrobe for different looks. How nothing she does seems put on or forced. Whenever she pops up on my feed, I feel inspired and giddy because the way she dresses doesn’t feel like a passing fad, but a true expression of herself and her worldview.
Victoria infuses pure joy into the way she dresses, and I have learned so much from her about putting together a fit from proportions to using neons and pastels as neutrals. I honestly think she’s the reason I’ve been cropping all my shirts.
Music: margeaux (@marg.mp3)
Margeaux Labat (known as marg.mp3 online) wore Docs to the Grammys this year. She went as the red carpet journalist for Pitchfork (which, is Pitchfork shuttering? What’s going on with that? I still don’t know). And while she paired her Docs with an understated black sheath dress and a slick bun, her appearance on the red carpet sidelines caused pop experimentalist Caroline Polachek to fangirl. Honestly, I would react the same way.
With her taste that runs the gamut from dream pop to post-punk, Margeaux treats music streaming platforms like one big record bin. On her page, you are just as likely to hear about the latest indie pop rock record as you are to discover a Japanese twee electronic album from the 90s or an obscure folk EP from the 70s. This particular review of bassist Anna Butterss’ Activities honestly saved me as I added the album to my Spotify downloads, forgot about it, and then rediscovered it on a 14+ hour plane ride.
Trust that whenever Marg drops, I am first in line. It could be a playlist, it could be a Reel Review, it could her walking us through her Spotify Wrapped. I don’t care. If Marg tells me to listen, I will listen.
Girl Blogger: lindsey louise (@officialnancydrew)
Of course, I had to put the muse on this list. I stumbled across Lindsey Louise’s series on Early Internet It Girls around the same time I was reading Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online. But whereas Lorenz looks at early Internet culture more broadly, Lindsey Louise’s focus on Internet It Girls is a fascinating excavation of how girls really built the social Internet as we know it today. And I knew as soon as Lindsey popped up on my FYP that I would be following her work all across the Internet.
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Lindsey is an OG fashion blogger from the 2000s, and while I didn’t follow her fashion blog back in the day, her reinvention as an archivist of the early Internet is most certainly one of the remaining reasons I go on TikTok at all. While I came for the Early Internet It Girls series, I stuck around for Lindsey’s thoughtful analysis of personal style, her devotion to being a Midwest fashion girlie, and her latest series where she interviews girls in Nebraska about their personal style (very much giving Seventeen magazine’s “Best Dressed Girls in America”).
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Art: Draizy (@draizys)
In another life, I was very much embedded in the comics industry. I’m not exactly sure how that happened, but the industry itself caused me a lot of heartache and stress, so now I try to stay away. However, I couldn’t resist adding one of my favorite cartoonist girlies to this list, so indulge me while I return to my comics critic roots for a sec to talk about one of the most SLEPT ON girlies making comics today, Daisy Ruiz.
I first became aware of Daisy’s work when I picked up her mini-comic, Gordita: Built Like This, which you can still buy a digital copy of via one of my fave small publishing houses, Black Josei Press. Gordita is a heartfelt story of a Mexican American teenager growing up in The Bronx and coming to terms with her body and how she’s perceive in the world. I immediately loved Daisy’s pages which feel more like collages than standard comics pages and were more fun than anything I had seen in comics for a minute.
But I’ve really been obsessing over her recent Lil Homies style recently, which transposes elements of the Japanese Chibi style onto Black and brown characters and Bronx-specific y2k fashions. She’s even bringing back the sacred art of paper doll making, running workshops and offering a free download of her character Lil’ Miss Burnside on her website.
It Girl: Alex Consani
I know Alex Consani is an It Girl because I still can’t figure out which TikTok account is actually hers. She has a million imitators (who might be bots) re-uploading her deranged, endlessly meme-able clips which makes her seem to be everywhere at once.
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Indeed, Alex Consani is bringing back the It Girl in a way most celebrities today seem incapable of doing. She’s not making content. She doesn’t do brand posts. I barley know anything about who she actually is. She’s everywhere and nowhere all at once. And I love that for her.
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Alright, girlies, that is all I have for you in this Internet Bedroom this week. Let me know in the comments: who are your favorite Internet It Girls past or present. And I hope you get everything you want and more for V-Day <3
xxx r.m.
next time:
My first long-form essay for paid subscribers will officially be out on my bday, March 7th, so why not give me an early bday gift and upgrade your subscription to paid or tell a friend about Internet Bedroom? <3
Next newsletter we’re gonna go straight into the heart of darkness, a.k.a. AOL Instant Messenger nostalgia, uncanny valley core, and much more. Don’t miss out!