New ‘clean girl’ and ‘old money’ aesthetics on TikTok make the same old link between hygiene and class

• Even scent and the way one organises and manages their time contribute, in different ways, to clean girl and old money aesthetics.
• These aesthetics are informed by a much larger history in which the performance of hygiene was entangled with ideas of class and race.

What are clean girl and old money aesthetics?

• The old money aesthetic, on the other hand, is right now best embodied by Sofia Richie, whose recent wedding in the south of France went viral for exemplifying the style.
• Old money aesthetics draw on notions of “quiet luxury”, also called “stealth wealth”, in which sporting fashions that are garish or excessively branded is considered a social faux pas.
• Without definitive rules, even Vogue admits the old money aesthetic is “hard to pin down”, describing it as “more of a mood than anything else”.

The entanglement of hygiene and wealth

• In this context, poor hygiene denoted poverty and, conversely, just like on TikTok, perceptions of cleanliness were associated with wealth.
• In Australia (and elsewhere), social reformers questioned whether poverty and poor hygiene were traits innate to certain populations, or whether hygiene could be taught.
• Hygiene discourse was weaponised to justify the so-called “protectionist” policy that segregated Indigenous populations in government-run missions and reserves.
• Contemporary clean girl and old money aesthetics draw on this history, redeploying racialised associations between hygiene and wealth to deem some people fashionable and aspirational.

The problems of clean girl and old money aesthetics

• Celebrity and other influencers promote an infinite array of beauty, hygiene, food and fashion products as able to engender clean girl and old money aesthetics.
• In requiring time and money, and being most prominently performed by a particular racialised group (young white women), clean girl and old money aesthetics function to exclude those unable to (literally and metaphorically) “buy-in”.
• In this way, clean girl and old money aesthetics can be understood as a contemporary reflection of the historical relationship between modern hygiene, race and class.