Glow Up and Gen. Z anxiety
Glow up and Gen Z anxiety
Series seven of the fresh-faced and perhaps intimidatingly youthful (make-up for the metaverse, anyone?) Glow Up is currently airing. There’s a cohort of creative and talented hopefuls, West Country heartthrob Val Garland, and Dominic Skinner diligently trying to sell ‘bring in the models’ as a catchphrase, as if anything but ‘ding dong’ could take that mantle.
Glow Up is a show that welcomes intergenerational viewing, as we can all equally marvel at the incredible concoctions on show. With Gen Z contestants, Boomer and Gen X hosts – plus Millennial guest hosts – there is wide generational representation. Usually, we see the generational divides between these different groups bridged by a shared love of make-up, creativity and innovation. However, episode six of the current series showed a stark volte-face from business as usual in this regard.
In this sixth episode, the main creative brief was to create a look based on the theme of ‘decadence’. As the Boomer, Gen X and Millennial hosts talked through how they would interpret the brief, they specified expecting indulgence and luxury. Their reference points included precious gems and costume jewellery, a proliferation of prosthetics, and general maximalism. In short, they leaned into the idea of frivolous extravagance. One Gen Z contestant followed a similar theme (Jake, with a visual ode to raiding pick and mix sweets with his nan), but all the other contestants took a very different approach: they focussed on decadence leading to corruption, colonialism, toxicity, over-consumption, and in one case, ‘the downfall of society’. Clearly, the generations were showing us drastically different interpretations of this theme.
Perhaps there’s an argument that this spin on decadence was taken because it seemed more artistically interesting to the contestants. However, I think such a striking difference is telling us something about the Gen Z experience. While other generations could think about decadence as enjoyable, for Gen Z there is an acknowledgment that consumption causes crisis, and that people and the planet are hurt by the choice to push too far. It is clear that indulging is no longer safe or fun, in the way that it was seen to be for older generations.
Through their creations, the Gen. Z contestants showed us how easy it is to picture things going wrong, or getting worse. Which, of course, is very aligned with their experience of the world so far, and with the increasingly scary future looming. It is interesting that other generations are not so tapped into this mentality: it is as if they still have a sense of being at the party, while Gen. Z are bracing themselves for an arduous clean-up once the guests have departed. That seems a large and lonely burden to carry.
As a therapist working through COVID, I was struck by the onset of the pandemic actually decreasing some people’s anxiety levels, rather than exacerbating them. Although everything was suddenly a lot scarier and unpredictable, some people were comforted in the fact that everyone was now feeling as anxious as they did on a daily basis. People were naming their fears, and talking about them together, in completely new ways. Despite everyone’s pandemic experience being different, the globe was united in experiencing the same thing at the same time, and everyone’s mind was focussed on this one, huge, thing. Although it was something terrifying uniting us, both the sense of a universal project and being able to share our emotional response to it freely went a long way to easing some anxieties.
This is a key difference in Gen. Z’s experience of the everyday world and the COVID experience: now, not everyone is talking about these things. Now, the fears feel less universal, less central to the world’s focus – despite the scary things having far bigger consequences than COVID. Now, they’re left trying to recycle the sequins that everyone else has chucked with abandon over their model’s face. Perhaps an undertone of the contestants’ pieces was the flash of a v-sign to the judges: because, of course, they are a part of the industries that the contestants were citing as having gone too far and caused damage. It will be interesting to see how the contestants create their own space within the same industries, from their new perspective: how will they make up, after what previous generations have done?