“I really prefer the word elegance. “Chic” has lost value in its native country — “Chic alors!” cries the street urchin on finding 10 francs in the gutter — and it never had much prestige in England,” Nancy Mitford writes in her 1951 essay for The Atlantic. Ever since chic first crept into the common vernacular – sometime in the mid-1800s – its definition has been slippery and contested.

While Marie Solis in The New York Times states, “it has become “kinda chic” to declare the death of the word chic”, the implications of limiting our language to that sourced from our feeds are worth examining. 

The word chic suffers from the same affliction as the word culture, as Clive Martin laments in the SEED Vulture Culture: there’s no synonym that even gets close to its enigmatic mix of nonchalance and glamour. Chic has experienced many iterations in its time: boho-chic, geek-chic, and lest we forget, heroin-chic. The latest update? Kinda chic.  

While the "kinda chic" trend began ironically – ascribing the essence of chic to something random, nonchalant, unassuming –  it’s spun out into the ridiculous and now applied to literally anything, be that having a low like count or eating toast. Other assertions of "kinda chicness" are too obvious: reading, going to galleries, playing an instrument. Generic cultural activities that haven’t earned a position in chic’s evasive echelons. 

It seems anything could be bolted onto the "kinda chic" prefix and it would stand. Kinda chic to trim your toenails. Kinda chic to take the bins out. Kinda chic to eat leftovers for breakfast. The trend’s gone so far that our very own Protein STUDIOS is now talking about their 8.5 metre ceilings and pink drill being kinda chic. No one is immune.

@proteinstudios

The most interesting analysis of the trend is not around the word chic itself, but the shrinking of our vocabulary that it's a symptom of. Perhaps there’s significant cultural grounding for why people want to be more chic, but we could swap chic out for cool, niche, iconic or demure, and it would point us in the same direction: a reduced lexicon reduces expression, which reduces understanding and human connection.

This is reinforced by falling reading rates and rising AI influence. Earlier this week, a study published in Nature –"AI writing assistants shrink linguistic diversity and blur personal identity" – confirmed what we’ve been observing: LLMs “homogenise writing style”, with writing becoming less and less varied as AI use spreads. "Kinda chic" precisely illustrates this.