On her sophomore album, Guts, Olivia Rodrigo sings about “makin’ the bed” and “pullin’ the sheets over [her] head.” The album’s accompanying artwork has her lolling around a hyper-feminine, 80s-style bedroom, surrounded by endless totems of teenage femininity. The bedroom, a central tenet of girl culture, is, of course, a fitting motif for Olivia, who’s fast becoming the patron saint of contemporary girlhood.
In 1977, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber identified “the culture of the bedroom” as a rich subculture worthy of study. They observed that teenage girls were socialised to spend their free time in their rooms, sequestered from crime, danger, and sexual impropriety, while boys cavorted around the streets, sowing their “wild oats” with impunity. As such, the bedroom became the centre of a teenage girl’s world, a nexus of communication, creativity and self-expression, where teenagers were “experimenting with makeup, listening to records, reading the mags, sizing up boyfriends, chatting, jiving.”
But teenage girls were doing more than devouring copies of Seventeen. Girls were using their rooms to pen poetry and diary entries, play instruments, write songs, and cultivate opinions. As technology advanced, the scope of this activity widened. After their invention in the 80s, camcorders were gifted as birthday and Christmas presents, resulting in amateur, bedroom set films (like the work of subversive teenage filmmaker Sadie Benning). In her 2007 essay “Productive Spaces”, Mary Celeste Kearney argued that a girl’s bedroom facilitated “teenagers’ cultural productivity”.
Meanwhile, the way teenagers decorated their sanctums became a form of creative rebellion against parental governance. (In the Guts canvases, Olivia Rodrigo tapes Polaroid photos to her walls with purple plasters). “They can’t really control their schooling or their home, but they can control what’s in their immediate surroundings,” explains Sonia Livingstone, a Media and Communications Professor at the London School of Economics who’s researched bedroom culture extensively. “It’s the space where young people express their separation from their parents, their independence from their parents.”
When the internet blew up, bedroom culture morphed again, this time to incorporate online fandom, digital communication, and eventually, social media as we know it. At the click of a button, teenage girls could access the world they’d been shielded from, learning and forming their identities with input from niche online communities and infinite information. After being seen and not heard for so long, being able to disseminate their ideas and creations to anyone with a dial-up internet connection bordered on radical.
Bedroom culture also came to dominate its own corner of the art world. In 2010, seminal director Petra Collins rose to prominence, renowned for her dreamlike framing of the female gaze. Her work positions bedroom culture at its core via soft-focus, avant-garde photographs of her subjects in bed. Petra has since, fittingly, become Olivia Rodrigo’s go-to music video director, endowing these videos with a nostalgic depiction of girlhood. Tracy Emin’s 1998 exhibit, “My Bed”, ignited controversy in the art world due to its unpolished depiction of women’s sexuality.
Today, bedroom culture has carved out a place at the centre of the zeitgeist, both practically and aesthetically. Due to COVID, soaring house prices and the cost of living, record numbers of young people are living at home well beyond their teenage years. For those in their childhood homes or living with roommates, the bedroom has retained its function as a private sanctuary, a space that can be decorated and occupied without policing and outside input. As such, bedroom culture and the facets of girlhood that come with it are seeping into adulthood, a trend typified by the popular online sentiment that millennial women feel like “teenagers in their 20s” (another trend that Olivia Rodrigo has unwittingly become the face of).
It makes sense, then, that bedroom culture is now a central tenet of pop and internet culture. The aesthetic has taken centre stage in television (Euphoria, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Sex Education) and the music videos of musicians making sense of the contemporary female experience (SZA’s “Hit Different x Good Days”, Arlo Parks‘ “Eugene” and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Nonsense”.) Most recently, Madison Beer, another patron saint of contemporary girlhood, announced her Silence Between Songs tracklist with a video of herself in a floral, Sofia Coppola-coded room, writing out the song titles on a whiteboard. Like the montage that plays when you stream Guts, Madison’s ‘whiteboard reveal’ insinuates that the album was composed in her room (a studied site of music production) for girls everywhere, who will blast it from theirs.
Needless to say, the trend quickly germinated to girl-ruled TikTok, where bedrooms serve as both the backdrop of videos and their subject. As noted by Kaitlin Tiffany in Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, “Today, the internet is home to fandom of bedroom culture itself. The girl stars of Instagram and YouTube and TikTok let others into their private spaces to watch them create that culture, and they’re followed by mini stan armies of their own.” On the app, our social media-engendered obsession with aesthetics has put its stamp on bedroom culture, with creators sharing videos of their pristine sanctuaries and offering tips and tricks on storage and interior design.
But it’s not all linen sheets and sparse walls. The less glossy side of bedroom culture ascended to the FYP when #bedrotting went viral (to boomer’s consternation), a trend that saw netizens ensconced between the covers for hours or days on end, eating, streaming TV, or surfing the internet. But Sonia — something of a bedroom culture expert at this point — sees something powerful in girls, whose mental health struggles have long been confined to private spaces, sharing this angst: “Girls are more likely to turn it [emotional upheaval] inward and experience it privately and just feel depressed and anxious and hopeless and more likely to attack themselves and their bodies. And to do that, you need a private place. Again, it’s the bedroom… the bedroom is a space of crisis, emotion, and difficulty, so sharing that, we could even say there’s a healthy side to this new trend because it’s making the private public.”
Other bedroom culture trends skew towards clutter and chaos, reflecting the hobbies and creativity explored there. An audio clip equating untidy bedrooms with the Sofia Coppola aesthetic (think the sisters’ bedrooms in The Virgin Suicides) recently did the rounds, with endless montages of cluttered bedrooms soundtracked by the audio, “Here’s the thing, when a boys room is messy it’s like ‘Oh my god, he’s filthy… but when my room is messy, when a girls room is messy, it’s Sofia Coppola, it’s hell is a teenage girl.” Twenty-one-year-old creative and hospitality worker Jessica, mentioned here under a pseudonym, lives at home and spends a lot of time in her room. She understands bedroom culture’s pivot toward maximalism, arguing it can incite creativity. “My room is so cluttered and messy, but I like the clutter because it’s all sentimental. It helps me creatively because I can draw inspiration from all my little memory triggers dotted around the place. It’s nice to see them and be reminded of those good memories if I’m not feeling the best or having a bit of a bed rot.”
Since its advent, bedroom culture has been slowly reclaimed from the gender norms that bore it. Today, thanks to women musicians and girls on the internet, it’s being celebrated in plain sight, alongside the word “girl” itself and its motley of related microtrends. So what if girls are sequestered from their rooms and out of danger? They rule the internet from there anyway. As Phoebe Bridgers sings in “I Know the End”, “there’s no place like my room.”