This article first appeared in our newsletter Fast Forward July 13, 2022.
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You probably don’t know Sasha Mutchnik and Leia Jospé. However, with their Instagram accounts @starterpacksofnyc et @favetiktoks420they are unquestionably the two @t-girls of the moment in New York. Sasha, propelled “Insta-anthropologist” by the magazine Interviewdescribes the cool kids of New York in “starter packs”, with surgical precision, adding depth to these ultra-referenced digital portraits via fake SMS screenshots.
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A small world where we are all the cool of another and its opposite, nourished with details that hit the spot. In a few elements, we can perfectly imagine the typology of the characters of a hype New Yorker in full post-Covid turmoil. Acidic but always precise, these little portraits gently make fun of the generation of appearances whose codes we play with and, by intertwining them, we find ourselves with the barely romanticized photo of our time, of a world where we could say that Sasha Mutchnik’s memes are the Rougon-Macquarts of our time.
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Soft boys
Leia Jospé is the “for you page” of the TikTok account that you don’t have. Every day, she compiles “the best of this generation’s unintended art,” turning ridicule into fascination. His favorite target, the “soft boys”, these handsome kids with slow gestures, half-cover ofHarlequin, mid-post LinkedIn personal development. The common point between all the characters of this telenovela in Insta grid? It’s never quite clear if they stayed totally or entirely in a role where TikTok filters would have passed through their flawless jaws to supposedly impenetrable areas of their psyche, turning them into an extra-nice parody of the comedic “bully” cliché. Americans.
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Two small magnifying glasses to invite themselves with humor and nerdism into an ultra-instantaneous US pop culture, the one that will always be afraid of not being cool tomorrow. And if these references are not mere gibberish for you, I strongly advise you to read Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe, a novel that perfectly defines what a form of new poetry can be, imbued with an oral discourse nourished by parties and the Internet.
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