Written by Luke Ziegler
As a senior reflecting on his four years at Harding, I have witnessed a lot of changes to this university. Three presidents, new buildings and a global pandemic affecting my freshman year, to name a few. However, what is perhaps the most harrowing difference is one of style: The granola aesthetic so prevalent during my freshman year has fallen out of vogue, if not died out completely. Ugg slippers have replaced Birkenstock Bostons; people carry Stanley cups instead of Nalgene water bottles; gone are those who wore calico-print bandanas as masks during Covid (the medical efficacy of those bandanas aside, they had such style about them). Of course, there are still crumbs of the granola, like those left from a Nature Valley bar, at Harding, but the dominant culture has shifted.
In my opinion, the granola aesthetic is reminiscent of a camp counselor boy/girl next door ingenue. Not to borrow too closely from the format of Gillian Flynn’s Cool Girl monologue, but they probably really like pour-over coffee; they own a variety of trucker hats; they went on Trek in high school; they have a fondness for .05 pictures and quirky Instagram photo dumps; their favorite Taylor Swift album is “Folklore” and their Patagonia sweaters smell like patchouli and essential oils. While the Granola Girl is a dominant cultural archetype, I believe the Granola Boy exists as well, and all these descriptors are characteristic of him.
What caused this decline in popularity? Did the trend cycle rise and fall like Fortune’s wheel? Much like the Roman Empire (the actual one, not the TikTok trend), it is incredibly difficult to pinpoint the exact cause and date of granola’s demise. Maybe the genesis of micro-niches and trends destabilized granola’s hegemony. There was too much exterior noise and internal instability for granola to remain dominant, like Visigoths harrying Rome’s borders while the populace enjoyed their panem et circenses. Perhaps the clean girl/ boy, the model-off-duty, the cottage-core, the it-girl/boy or the coquette provided too many derivations in aesthetic trends, causing the granola to fracture and splinter.
Whatever the case, granola has been replaced by a multiplicity of personal styles and aesthetics, especially at Harding. Are people being more individualistic and varied? That could be it, or are they merely more closely aligned and subscribed to a capitalistic trend narrative that has figured out how to better and more accurately market to specific consumers? Maybe, like the cerulean belt scene in The Devil Wears Prada argues, our decisions were made for us by powerbrokers in Milan, New York and London before any of us really knew what style was or how we wanted to use it to express ourselves. No matter one’s thoughts on free will when it comes to aesthetics, one must acknowledge that Harding provides a case study in how trends, aided by social media, have broken down dominant cultures in favor of bespoke micro-niches.
