Essay: TikTok's Eurocore Summer
The continental vibe.
Hello, this is Kyle Chayka, I’m a staff writer for The New Yorker and a guy on Twitter (for now), welcome to my personal newsletter! First a recap of my recent work and then a new essay on TikTok’s ambient obsession with the Mediterranean.
Touchstones: In the Mood for Love: I got the chance to write a reconsideration of Wong Kar Wai’s great 2000 film “In the Mood for Love” for The New Yorker’s Touchstones series. The magazine’s interactive team turned my memories of discovering the film as a teenager into a very cool multimedia exploration. Several people told me that this piece helped them re-experience the film, like watching it again for the first time. I love that!
Reconsidering the Luddites in the Age of AI: I reviewed Brian Merchant’s new nonfiction book Blood in the Machine about the Luddites, the 19th-century rebels against industrialization who smashed weaving machines. Their pro-labor activism has lessons for us as we face a wave of automation through artificial intelligence.
Filterworld: My book on how algorithmic feeds have flattened culture is coming out January 16! You can pre-order it on Amazon here, or Bookshop, or Doubleday. Galleys are also starting to roll out for critics and journalists; email me if you want more info on that, or await a future newsletter.
TikTok’s Eurocore Summer
This past summer (sob), I went on a long-delayed vacation in France. For the first part of the trip, Jess and I landed at a perfectly rundown hotel on the Giens peninsula, which sticks into the Mediterranean like a promenade. Then, we met up with a bunch of friends at a house outside of Eygalières, a rural Provence village with a few blocks of main street hosting one butcher, one bakery, a small grocery store, and a handful of restaurants. But on Saturday morning we walked the ten minutes into town to find that it was flooded with people. An antiques market filled the streets. Visitors in wide-brimmed straw hats brandished smartphones at vintage dish sets, mid-century furniture, and racks of chore coats. The vendors muttered that the market had blown up on Instagram and thus gotten too crowded with influencers — the antiques set out against the antique stone streets were “too photogenic” for the social-media set to stay away. That day, the one ATM in Eygalières ran out of cash; Jess ended up buying a few tablecloths from a shopkeeper who accepted US dollars because her husband was American.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at the crowds: My TikTok feed had been full of European tourism content all summer before the trip. There were clips of the pastel-colored townhouses of Positano in Italy, “gatorade water” beaches on the French Riviera, terrace dinners on Greek islands, train rides from Nice to Monaco, and even empty stretches of sand in Croatia and Albania. The feed proferred a generic wash of seaside videos; it didn’t matter so much where they were from so long as they had sun, sand, water, and artfully arranged platters of raw seafood. Many of these videos were hashtagged #europeancore or #eurocore. In TikTok argot, the suffix -core appended to a word turns it into a signifier for a cohesive aesthetic. It was Europe as a style that anyone can participate in — in other words, Europe as a meme. Tara Torcaso, an event designer in Newport Beach, California, who posted her own eurocore TikToks from Saint Tropez, told me: “People are either going to Europe, or if they’re not going, they’re trying to find a piece of Europe at home, with their decor or throwing a party.”
That “-core” often presents a perversion or misunderstanding of its subject, however. “Normcore” in the mid-2010s was the fetishization of the normal — thus making it abnormal. Cottagecore is more about the bucolic aesthetic and making cups of tea than actually having a thatched roof. Eurocore, then, is “the romanticization of life in the Mediterranean,” Ingrid Martins de Barros, a fashion consultant in Brazil, told me. She continued, “It's about being immersed in culture, well-being, and beauty, with no other concerns than enjoying the summer.” She said that Brazilian influencers were pursuing the trend, too, even though it was winter in the southern hemisphere. Aesthetics like eurocore are combinations of disparate symbols and signifiers; like playing dress-up, you can try a few on even if you’re not literally living the trend.
“Tomato Girl Summer” is another label for the eurocore look. Participants put on makeup to look a bit like the seasonal fruit that everyone was making into sandwiches: a base layer of terracotta blush with pops of red on the cheeks and forehead. It’s a visual suggestion of “being outside, sun-kissed, maybe in your garden or out by the water,” Janet Ribando, a beauty TikTok creator in New York, told me. “People want to feel like they’re somewhere else.” Ribando wore the look during a trip to Seattle. “I would love to do the Tomato Girl in actual Italy,” she said. The great thing is that you can be eurocore anywhere. Some influencers in Virginia embraced it by turning off their air conditioning — just like Paris. Amalfi coast-themed dinners have become popular with Torcaso’s event-planning clients. (“I feel like my life year-round is eurocore,” she said.) Having a vermouth on your balcony at 5 PM? Eurocore. So is walking to get a gelato after dinner. For a while after our vacation, I liked to walk around our neighborhood in DC and point out all the tall stone townhouses and neoclassical architecture: très eurocore.
Eurocore is a game, a way of experiencing the world that becomes participatory and shareable through the multimedia space of TikTok, which is a machine for turning life into real-time digital content. Lately I’ve been thinking of such affective filters of reality as “moods.” This is not original; first, it’s already slang: Europe is such a mood, meaning that European lifestyle has a strong vibe, it’s aspirational, we like it. But the German philosopher Heidegger (whose work I do not by any means understand) thought a lot about moods in the early 20th century, too. He described human existence as “being-in-the-world” and a “mood” as a way of being. Heidegger wrote, in a translation by William Blattner, “A mood is a way, not merely a form or a mode, but rather a manner, like a melody, which does not float above the so-called actual being occurrent of a person, but rather sets the key of this being, that is, it attunes and determines the manner of his being.” A mood makes you interface with your surroundings, perhaps even your era, your milieu, differently.
TikTok has been adept at codifying these moods and branding them into hashtags. One type of video has stuck in my mind. In them, people demonstrate how they play medieval-ish music and role-play a “tavern wench” while cleaning their kitchen, almost subconsciously sliding into the role of a productive domestic servant — for themselves. It makes the labor pass faster, because the ambient environment feels more conducive or encouraging for the task at hand. Similarly, the TikTokers documenting themselves wading into the sea, reading by the beach, drinking espresso, and riding Vespas for the sake of #eurocore are live-action role-playing Europeanness, in Europe. Which is, of course, what tourists have been doing for centuries. In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American novelist whose ex-pat lifestyle would have presented quite well on social media, described the Mediterranean as “a playground for the world.”
TikTok makes it easy to participate in the ambient vibe of a place, to exist within a chosen mood, without engaging as much with physical reality. It’s a bit like the experience of playing Pokémon GO in its heyday. You walk around the physical world, but your mind is in the digital overlay, engaging with the monsters that exist only on your screen. The conversation you are participating in, even the primary experience that you are having, exists there, online. You’re not eating; you’re having Girl Dinner. You’re not cleaning your kitchen; you are taverncore. Your family isn’t rich; you’re just a coastal grandmother. The mood makes real life more interesting, or at least interweaves it more with life online, where feedback is instantaneous and it’s easier to keep score.
There is an actual jump in European tourism this year; it’s not just a TikTok phenomenon. In part it’s due to the pandemic recovery. “Many of these trips were in gestation for three years, and Europe is benefiting as a result,” Rafat Ali, the founder and C.E.O. of the travel-industry publication Skift, told me. “It also has a feeling of a last hurrah from pandemic saving before people hunker down for 2024,” he said. (A frightening thought.) A recent article in The Guardian observed that Australian tourists are also increasingly turning to classical European grand tours instead of, say, backpacking through Southeast Asia, almost twice as many as two decades ago. Everyone wants to go on vacation, and nothing seems to epitomize vacation more than a rented beach chair beneath a striped umbrella in front of turquoise-blue sea.
The French and Italian Riviera regions in particular have an aura of old money and “quiet luxury,” another aesthetic TikTok has been fascinated by since the stars of Succession donned cashmere baseball caps and congregated on yachts. In fact, the rich and famous have been summering in these destinations for centuries, if not millennia. Emperor Tiberius had a pleasure villa built on the Italian island of Capri in 26 C.E., establishing a trend among ancient Roman elites. The ruins of a villa preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius were found underneath Positano’s Church of St. Maria Assunta in 2004. These destinations are the tourism equivalent of the dining obsession with burgers and martinis: pure, nigh-universal pleasure. You can’t argue with them. (Maybe the Mediterranean mania is the 2020s’ update to the 2000s’ Under the Tuscan Sun, but driven by user-generated videos rather than a single memoir or film.)
Thus, some travelers get upset when it’s not so simple or frictionless. Physical reality intrudes on their eurocore moods. There are also TikTok videos of tourists cramming into overcrowded buses, dragging their suitcases up the streets of precipitous hillside towns, and queuing in single file to take clear photos of Santorini rooftops. They complain that Europe is maybe a little too European, too real. But after all, these geographical places aren’t just fodder for a mood; they resist being turned into pure digital content to be consumed.
I talked to some tourism professionals in Italy to see what they made of this new wave. Elizabeth Minchilli, an American author, tour planner, and prolific TikToker who has lived in Rome and Umbria for more than 30 years, told me that she saw more tourists planning their trips based on social media. “People are getting their travel advice from TikTok. If they see someone who looks like them in a beautiful place doing something delicious, they’re more likely to save it,” she said. You might see one of Minchilli’s idyllic videos of an Umbrian farmhouse luncheon (I really recommend following her), or one of the photographer Sam Youkilis’s beatific clips of cliff diving in Ravello and decide you just have to go there and do that thing. The copycat effect isn’t resulting in ideal travel. “Positano sucks,” Minchilli said. “It sucks in that there’s no easy way to get there. I’ve been telling people not to go to Positano for at least six years now.”
“Eurocore” is a misnomer because “Europe” does not just consist of getting a gelato. “People think Italy is one destination, or Europe is one destination. Europe is not a country; Italy is barely a country,” Minchilli said. It follows a certain American brand of consumerism: Travel is defined by replicating a photo of Lake Como that you saw on Instagram, rather than engaging more deeply with the history or specificity of a place, much less the actual residents. As Agnes Crawford, a British tour guide in Rome, described the tourists’ approach, “On your holiday, you can’t just lounge about and see what’s what; you have to go to the place that people went to, otherwise you’re missing out.” Crawford continued, “There’s a certain kind of lack of imagination in wanting to go to the same place as as everyone else.” Dabbling in the mood of eurocore does not entail learning about Tiberius. Instead you’re probably just reading Emma Cline’s The Guest.
So what do we want from eurocore if not Europe? I think it’s more like an attitude, a lifestyle — the mood rather than its source. I asked Tara Torcaso, the event planner, what she found so appealing about it. She said that when she was traveling in France and Italy, everyone around her just seemed to be more present, more engaged in their own lives. “People aren’t just sitting on their phones and taking pictures. They really are in the moment with things,” she said. That mood of being offline, fully immersed in drinking wine and chatting with a friend on a seaside terrace, ironically makes for the best online content. Other people, like me, want to consume it because that sense of analog experience is so desirable at the moment — even though by mainlining it through our phones we might be missing the point. Elizabeth Minchilli compared it to the local Italian ethos of dolce far niente, embracing the pleasure of doing nothing. “The hashtags are an attempt by tourists to capture this lifestyle,” she said. “They don’t alway get it right, but that’s ok. At least they’re trying.”
If you liked this essay, please pre-order my book on the same subjects! Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture is out from Doubleday on January 16, 2024.
Reading qualitycore on substack is far more satisfying than tiktok.
Excellent cultural piece, Kyle.