The New Weird Girl

I had a friend in middle school, who I will call V. We painted denim jackets with craft-store acrylics and swapped shoes during recess, just one shoe each, so we’d have mismatched uniform loafers by the end of the day. V’s feet turned inward when she walked, two small compasses pointing at each other instead of north, and one afternoon the other kids decided this was worth imitating in the hallway: a whole parade of children walking like her, laughing as though her gait were a personal failing rather than simply the way her body worked.

On a school trip not long after, I went through my things and realised I’d packed my belongings in a plastic cellophane sack, the semi-translucent kind that crinkles if you so much as breathe near it, while the kids around me carried totes and Herschel backpacks that would, in a few short years, evolve into Neverfulls and Goyards. The headmistress looked at my bag the way you’d look at a unicorn that had wandered into a stable.

“Stop being weird,” she said. I understood instantly that the word had just been handed to me as a verdict on class, personality, status and belonging. Weird is a cruel word to a kid. Crueler still when you’re an adult and can still recite every time you were called it. Most people called weird in childhood weren’t hearing it as a compliment.

What does it actually mean to accept and reclaim your own weirdness? How do you stop performing just enough uniqueness to charm a room, and start sticking your metaphorical rainbow-stained tongue out at the lot of them, at peace with being different? Is it okay to be weird now?

Anyone who has met the critical eyes of the herd has probably either tried to prove they are different or to conform. Somewhere in the last decade, the word itself got repurposed by the people who once used it as a weapon. “They’re so weird” shifted from “they can't sit with us” to a signal of discernment, a soft flex disguised as observation, the verbal equivalent of name-dropping a restaurant no one’s heard of. The word that used to raise alarms now raises your social stock.

Long-term studies on adolescent social hierarchy, tracking teenagers into adulthood, have found that cool status built on precocious risk-taking and physical maturity often correlates with worse outcomes later in life: more difficulty in relationships, more substance use. The traits that read as effortless command in eighth grade can curdle without the audience that once rewarded them. The eccentric kid, by contrast, was building an internal compass that didn't depend on the room's approval, which turns out to be the muscle creative endurance requires later, the one nobody warns you you’ll need.

This is also where fashion enters the conversation, because fashion has never quite known what to do with weird except sell it back at a markup. Countercultural signals are absorbed and licensed with speed that would be funny if it weren't so profitable: a thrift-store gesture reappears eighteen months later on a runway with a four-figure price tag, the outsider sign becoming a high-status password while the actual outsiders remain outside.

In “Ornament and Crime” (1913) the Viennese architect Adolf Loos argued that decoration was cultural regression, a primitive reflex dressed up as taste. Ornament was noise; he wanted buildings and bodies stripped to function, clean surfaces standing in for moral progress. Reading him now, you can feel the old shame reactivate: the same flush that crossed my face when the headmistress looked at my cellophane bag, the instant apology for having wanted to express anything at all.

The scholar Olu Jenzen, in a chapter on “weird women,” draws on Mark Fisher’s claim that weirdness exposes the limits of our categories rather than violating them. As Fisher writes in The Weird and the Eerie (2016), “if the entity or object is here, then the categories... cannot be valid.”

In 1964, Susan Sontag wrote in Notes on Camp that pure camp is naive. “Camp taste is... a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation, not judgment,” she writes. Weirdness, through this lens, isn’t a flaw creative endurance survives despite. It’s closer to what Sontag calls “a tender feeling”: the thing you extend toward something too sincere, too unguarded to succeed by ordinary measures, and love anyway.

“Weirdness I’ve learned always pays off. It was a moment when things piled up,” Eileen Myles writes in The Importance of Being Iceland.

I recently saw a TikTok explaining that if you’re a weird girl in 2026, you should be making weird girl money. It was the first time in years I’d been reminded of labels that used to make me hesitant. Conveniently, it arrived days after a producer at one of the world’s biggest news outlets accidentally sent me a WhatsApp message meant for someone else: “I think [my name] is weird.”

I hated how much it offended me. I hated how familiar it felt. I’d heard some version of it so many times before—from others, and probably from myself—in attempts to recalibrate my normalcy, or my step-above-normalcy, otherwise known as taste. @theefolio on TikTok argued that that kooky self is profitable now. Despite my reservations about feeding it back into the machine, I felt something close to excitement.

Are you a Samantha or a Carrie? God, I love Phoebe from Friends. Mojo Jojo from The Powerpuff Girls. Rugrats legend Tommy Pickles. A Björk altar in a bedroom.

I’ve tried so hard to shed the weird, to make myself appetising for the carnage. Weird should never be a performance. I want to be myself so badly that I wish people could see that the first person I picture when I think “weird girl” doesn’t exist anymore, though I don’t want anyone to feel guilty about it. I just wish they could see that liking Hieronymus Bosch won’t make the wounds of being weirded out fade any quicker.

My 80-year-old Korean professor made me cry the other day. He was talking about his days traveling through Dhaka, buying cassettes. “I used to think French was the most beautiful language,” he admitted. “Then I heard Bengali, and I think that's the most beautiful language in the world.” He played us songs from Bangladesh, and the Bengali students recognized them instantly, naming the traditions underneath. I’m still not entirely sure why I got emotional. But I wondered whether anyone in that room, decades ago, would have thought him weird for caring this much.

At a zine festival in Tokyo, I passed a familiar name – past the Japanese Che Guevara on a motorcycle and girls making book keychains of phallic pages – and saw “Dayvigo” foregrounded on naïve design layouts. “Do you know Dayvigo?” the vendor giggled. She’d turned her musings from sleeping pills into a zine, tightly bound into a storybook. I didn’t know it, though I’d seen the subway ads. She was, without a doubt, a certified rock-on weird girl.

She wasn’t selling weird things but handing over the truest record of her nervous system, stapled twice down the spine, asking only that I look without judgement.

Embracing weirdness is closer to stopping the bloodletting than starting a treatment – the realisation that nothing toxic was ever in there to drain. “I had moved here to be weird,” Myles writes.

I owe a lot to Tokyo for my reunderstanding of my own weirdness. There are parts of the city built for the masses, and there’s a real case for simplicity in times of overconsumption. But once you stop measuring weird through objects, the importance of ornament beyond signalling comes into focus. Takashi Murakami was once laughed at by the Tokyo art establishment that later showed him in Versailles. What he was doing was taking otaku obsession – the devotion to a figurine repainted forty times – and arguing it already contained painting’s long struggle with flatness and low desire.

Terayama Shūji was a poet, playwright, and filmmaker in Japan’s 1960s–70s angura scene, and founder of Tenjō Sajiki. Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets opened with actors addressing audience members by seat number, refusing the fourth wall the way Murakami later refused the gallery’s distance from merchandise. The work was an assault on bookishness itself—the idea that reading had become a kind of secondhand life. I first watched it in class, and what struck me wasn’t shock but precision. It behaved less like a film than an intervention, and audiences reportedly left angry enough to throw their books away.

What it takes to be weird today, the kind that doesn't ask forgiveness first, is recognising that Loos’s boundary has become porous. A craftsman in Okayama can spend three days hand-dyeing jeans in indigo and sell out a run to people who drove hours for it. That’s it, perhaps. To be seen as you are. But weird used to cost you; now it pays.

Being weird doesn’t require radical encumbrance. There’s no pledge into eccentricity. Niche reads as weird by default. Nobody asked the weird kids whether they wanted the word back, but if a kid grows up wanting to be an indigo-dyer with wooden teeth and mismatched loafers, who are we to tell her to play it safe and go with Piana instead? After all, weird kids have always preferred bespoke.