April’s Rough Draft

There’s this thing that happens in April where everything feels provisional. The weather can’t decide. People half-commit to new versions of themselves—short hair, pink hair, whatever. The culture starts moving in directions it’s not sure about yet.

The good stuff feels obvious in hindsight but strange in the moment. SLR cameras were having this resurgence where people wanted weight and intention in their hands again. Waffle shops and vintage stores were the places to waste an afternoon. Second-hand everything, because new felt aggressive. Pastel nail polish and white eyeliner—these small, almost imperceptible shifts in how people presented themselves. You’d see couples out like it was a recent invention, short-haired men with actual beards instead of the baby scruff everyone else was doing. Someone would cadge a cigarette off you and mean it.

What wasn’t working was anything that tried too hard. Facial tattoos felt desperate. Leggings everywhere felt like everyone had given up. The iPhone was somehow still off-putting—too clean, too designed. People who claimed to be trash but were actually just suburban felt transparent. Unkempt feet in spring felt like a betrayal. Those androgynous men in cut-out shirts trying to look dangerous—they just looked uncertain.

The weird oscillation between what felt authentic and what felt false was the real April tell. Bike culture was happening but it had to be the right kind of bike. Fashion was recycling the 80s but only the cool parts. Everyone was navigating this narrow bandwidth of what was acceptable to care about while still seeming like you didn’t care at all.

You could tell a lot about someone by what they were willing to do in April, which things they’d abandoned and which ones they were doubling down on. It was shallow, obviously—just cultural trend-spotting, the kind of thing that matters only because enough people decided it should. But that’s exactly how culture works. Someone noticed pink hair. Other people noticed someone noticed. By April it’s a thing. By June it’s over.