It is 3 a.m. You have been scrolling through TikTok for the past two hours. Your homework sits across the room untouched, wedged between your Hydroflask water bottle and the chunky sneakers you kicked off after getting home from school. Sound familiar? You might be a VSCO Girl.  

“I think of shell necklaces, Hydroflasks, scrunchies, and white vans [when someone says VSCO girls],” Ava Springer, sophomore, said. 

A big part of being a VSCO girl is keeping up with popular trends. Most of these looks are popular in other fashion groups, but wearing them together is seen as the VSCO girl brand. 

VSCO started as an app to share photography without numbers of likes and follows in order to emphasize the quality of images, and it has become a cultural phenomenon. 

“People use VSCO for showing off the trendy part of their life and filtering photos to make them better. People before VSCO became a trend used the app to filter their photos,” Kiersten James, sophomore, said. 

Although the app VSCO became a platform to share these, the term “VSCO Girl’’ was popularized on Tik Tok as a way to mock the group of girls who wear similarly styled outfits. But unlike the term ‘basic,’ this new age of the VSCO girl is seen as an empowering way to create an image online. This offshoot of internet culture has adopted the term as a title, wearing it proudly. 

“…The stereotype may have started out as a cruel joke, but now it’s taken on a life and a style of its own,” Roisin Lanigan, VICE magazine contributor, said. 

Some Etowah students think that VSCO will be like any other style, and be gone as new looks become popular.

“I think [VSCO style] is just a phase on the internet and in fashion, just like the preppy style was,” Devin Varnadoe, junior, said.

Whether there will be an end to the scrunchies, matching outfits, and Hydroflask water bottles seen around the Etowah campus is up for debate, but one thing is clear, VSCO style is making an impact on the way students are using social media to build their brand.