Ava Stringer ’28

by Ava Stringer ’28 on April 16, 2026

Specifically, pray for the girls who wear them. If you have eyes and go to Providence College, you have seen these everywhere. In the winter, worn with a black Aritzia Super Puff and Ugg mini boots, or in the spring, with black Lululemon leggings and Rainbow flip flops instead. This sweatshirt is unmistakable: a painfully generic sweatshirt with a mock neck that somehow makes it cost 150 dollars. Don’t forget the meaningless words stitched on the front. It’s so cute, so trendy, and so boring. It’s no one’s fault for wearing them. These days, falling for consumerism isn’t a choice. These girls have TikTok, Instagram, and thousands of influencers shoving paid partnerships and personal merch down their throats. Parke is just the frontrunner in the race of microtrends. Every influencer makes athleisure, matching sets, and hoodies that are special to the creator, but they just follow the cycle of what’s trending. 

Those at the top of your feed are brands like Chelsea Kramer’s Parke, Paige Lorenze’s Dairy Boy, Bridget Bahl’s The Bar, Matilda Djerf’s Djerf Avenue, Alix Earle’s Hot Mess merch, and Alex Cooper’s Unwell merch. 

The pattern is rinse, wash, and repeat until these clothes fall apart in one trip to your dorm laundry room. The reason this happens is because influencers are only influential so long as their followers allow them to be. They capitalize off of convincing you to talk, eat, dress, act, and breathe a certain way so you can be just like them. They manipulate their own lives, turning everything into a highlight reel, a get ready with me or a story time, benefitting from every second of attention you give them. This kind of momentary popularity isn’t concrete, so they must create something sustainable. Let’s be honest, Shein-quality clothes produced in questionable factories across different countries, made from synthetic materials, are the opposite of sustainable. 

Every successful female influencer builds their brand by doing one thing: following. Their fame is determined by their followers, yet they follow whatever influencer has more fame than them. It’s a constant pattern of no one truly having an identity. That’s the problem with Gen Z; everyone waits for others to tell them what their aesthetic is. It changes with every Rhode flavor of the month and the latest emotional support water bottle. So maybe that group of girls in your theology class really do just love Chelsea Kramer’s middle name, but I doubt that.