click around, see what you find
We Are All West Village Girls
A few weeks ago, a controversial piece from New York magazine's The Cut was making the rounds. It was by Brock Coylar, a writer I had never heard of, but one who seemed to possess a most crucial aspect of being featured somewhere like New York Mag: capturing something that people accept, but not really knowing why. Their piece was titled “It Must Be Nice To Be A West Village Girl”, and I find myself coming back to it, over and over.
Wait a second, I hear you say. There have always been rich (mostly) white women in Manhattan! They’ve always been conventionally attractive and had mysteriously endless sources of income! Yes, yes, I know that. I promise I’m not an idiot! What struck me about Coylar’s piece was their lens of taking this up as an anthropological assignment. Instead of dunking on these women, which is really (really) easy, they decide to dig a little deeper. Coylar does not humanize or demonize these girls, they simply present them as what they are: young, hot, and in the West Village.
I’ll let the cat out of the bag though -every city in America, nay, perhaps the world, has their own West Village Girl. Whether the ones in lower Manhattan are the blueprint or not, that, I cannot say. (Once UDD3R receives the proper funding, I will travel to every cosmopolitan city in the world and find out. For journalism.) As someone who spent some time in a few of those cosmopolitan cities however, I’ve seen this before.
In my hometown of San Francisco, it feels like these women are just as plentiful as they are in New York. They are, disparagingly or not, called Marina Girls, because, much like the West Village Girls, their most defining characteristic is the neighborhood they choose to spend their 20’s in. In San Francisco, the Marina and its surrounding enclaves (Cow Hollow, Fort Mason) are hotbeds of young professionals who look really good in a workout set. The setup helps. There are restaurants to be seen at, bars to get (just enough of your) crazy in, and a seemingly endless variety of hyper-focused fitness studios. (A shout out to the one time my ex took me to her Pilates class. I think it was called Bodyrock. Or Rock Your Body? Either way, it nearly killed me. She was perfectly fine, however.)
The neighborhood itself is quite charming- tree lined streets are adorned with ample outdoor seating and colorful Edwardians. Attractive 20-somethings are walking their French bulldogs or golden retrievers. There’s an equally intoxicating buzz on Saturday night as there is on Sunday morning; the former promising debauchery and excitement, the latter ensuring a really good acai bowl after a HIIT class. There are some genuine old timers still left in the neighborhood, and they’re friendly and off-kilter, as most of San Francisco used to be. They’re probably having a beer at Bus Stop, or picking up groceries in the cavernous aisles of Marina Supermarket. Being so close to the water, the area either has the densest fog in the city, or the nicest days to meet up with friends. If it wasn’t obvious, I’ll let you in on another secret: I love the Marina.
But that wasn’t always the case. And I surmise it’s for the same reasons that folks dunk on the West Village.
When I lived in San Francisco, I noticed there was one word that kept coming up whenever I talked about the Marina with people, whether they grew up in the Bay Area or not. Now that I live in New York, I hear people use the same exact word to describe the West Village, and the many young women (and men) that live there.
That word is basic.
Well, Ilya...To me, it’s just... basic! That’s what my people tell me, whether we’re holding court at Vesuvio in SF’s beautiful North Beach, or kicking back in New York’s Central Park. Basic is the word that consistently comes up when describing these two neighborhoods. To me, this word can be viciously suffocating- I imagine a life where I live in the suburbs of Colorado driving a Honda Odyssey. I have two kids, and a wife who makes biweekly trips to Crumbl Cookies. In this twisted bizarro world, we go to the same Margaritaville in Orlando twice a year, and I get excited when I see there’s a new Marvel movie coming out. In short, it’s truly frightening.
But there’s another side to basic. Similar to being cringe, embracing the right amount of basic can offer you a kind of freedom. A freedom of thought, an openness to try things that seem distinctly outside your wheelhouse. A ‘healthy basic’, I like to call it. And oh man, was I rocking that for a while.
A banana smoothie from Earthbar after a 3 mile run around Crissy Field? Check. Meeting up with the homies at Balboa Cafe to wingman each other but not talk to any girls the whole time? Oh, hell yea. Buying something every single time I walk by Aggregate Supply, because I have no self control? Brother, I am there.
It’s hard for me to reconcile how off putting this all sounds when it’s on the page. Some of my friends graciously look to me as a tastemaker, I am sure that’s no longer the case after this is published. And that’s fine. I’m older now. I can get down with a little basic.
But truth is that this kind of lifestyle is an immense privilege, one that a sizable chunk of a West Village economic class fail to realize. This is the heart of where the ridicule comes from, and rightly so. A prime example of this is one girl who was interviewed by Coylar proudly exclaiming: “You can have a Cartier Love bracelet and still care about immigrant rights.” Obviously that’s true, but my god does it sound like you give absolutely zero fucks about immigrant rights when you say it like that. No matter the context, you will come off as a prick.
But again, dunking on this kind of thing is easy, and not exactly productive. My interest, much like Coylar’s, was to understand it beyond the ridicule, an anthropological dipping of the toe. I was interested in the day to day, as well as the hand that guided it. In short, I was interested in the lifestyle.
The very first thing that one notices is that it's aspirational, and a lot of Coylar’s original piece was an examination of how these girls mimic what they see neighborhood influencers doing. If one were to try and nail down the root of this ‘basic lifestyle’, one that influencers are often peddling, it’s imperative to remember that we live in a culture that emphasizes optimization.
In America, nothing is ever enough. There must always be more and it must always be better. It is not enough that you make a good salary, you must invest that salary so that it can bring you more money. It is not enough that you are healthy and breathe in the morning air, you must have a comically large six pack. Are you seriously taking out your iPhone 12 in front of the entire dinner table right now? Are you genuinely out of your goddamn mind? It’s 2025, you need to upgrade, and you need to upgrade it now.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a young woman amid this culture, especially in a major city. But someone who has is Jia Tolentino, and I find her writing to be genuinely striking. She’s a voice at the New Yorker that I never tire of, and in her book Trick Mirror, she unravels the constant optimization culture that we find ourselves in. She does a great job of illustrating it for those who aren’t women in big cities.
It could look like a few things- taking barre classes because while you want to be toned, you don’t want to be muscular. It’s having one of those prebiotic sodas because while you want something sweet, you don’t want to consume heaps of sugar. Doing a ponytail just right, but leaving it a little messy, so people don’t assume you’re an insane control freak.
Men have this too, but our “optimizing” is much more laughable- cold plunging to reset our brains, unproven supplements to boost our bodily functions, and problematic podcasts that fast forward our commute. (And maybe shape a volatile and dangerous political ideology.)
But to even participate in this culture of optimization, this culture of basic, well, that is in itself a privilege of massive proportions. I write this as I look out on an Upper East Side balcony after just having shoveled down some Sweetgreen. I am no better than any West Village Girl. It’s quite the opposite. We are quite similar, them and I. And truthfully- if you’re reading this, you probably are, too.
