Your Favorite Influencer
Is a 2.0 Valley Girl
“Every time I sit down to eat, I hear a woman’s voice in my head. Sometimes she is from New York City, sometimes Los Angeles. She has an impressive vocal fry and a lifestyle that revolves around taking 10,000 steps a day. She makes her living online, posting videos that tell other women how to eat.”
-The New York Times Magazine, “Today’s ‘Skinny Influencers’ Are Selling Something More Mind-Bending Than Weight Loss,” 20251.
For a good stretch in the 1980s, the Valley Girl2 represented economic prosperity and capitalist abundance. A symbol of constant consumption—and along the relatively new parameters of “lifestyle”—she was as culturally mocked as she was financially sought after. The same can be said of her daughter: the influencer.
When I see young, light-skinned, female influencers shilling everything from lip tint to gua sha techniques to unboxing, I see prominent flickers of the Valley Girl from the 1980s. Approachable, adorable, unthreatening, and utterly relatable as she shares her middle-class consuming habits, she is the 2020s version of the sweet, suburban girl with the side ponytail who giddily purchased Guess jeans from the Galleria. Whether it’s Radio Shack or the Apple store, she’s telling you what she thinks of the new walkman, the new iPhone, the new iPods, the new Sony headphones. She is aspirational in her products and purchases, which both define and distinguish her. And, most importantly, she is always seeking out more. Much like the never-ending scroll of her platforms, there are always more products and more hauls to procure and share. She is commerce and commerce is her.
Even the way prominent female influencers speak has Valley Girl roots. Products are “cute,” and “so fun.” She is “obsessed!” with this face serum or that lip liner. She uses “like” to punctuate and emphasize her many product reviews in the consistent grammatical patterns of a valley girl3. This phenomenon has a name: “TikTok voice” is essentially a valley girl accent, according to NPR. Linguist and TikToker Adam Aleksic told the outlet, “It's sort of a prestige dialect on the internet that also helps with platform retention. When viewers are listening, they want to keep listening to people when they have uptick in their voice.”4 Other linguists have made the same observation about “uptalk” within the valley girl dialect, suggesting that the rising intonation is a way to signal that more information is coming. And yet, these linguistic innovations by young women and girls—deviations of standardized (read: patriarchal) speech—are interpreted flatly as indicators of stupidity.
She is commerce and commerce is her.
The influencer and the Valley Girl both use speech that is considered affable but curious—an easy target for misogynistic critique5 to dismiss her prowess or validity.
The misogyny that traces both figures is revealing. The influencer and the Valley Girl share a twin reality across economics and gender: dismissed as “stupid” and “not serious” while representing millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars. As of 2025, the global influencer market is worth $33 billion dollars, an industry that has more than tripled since 20206. In an age when most customers actively block traditional ads or don’t engage with them at all, 80 percent of marketers say that influencer “relationships” are good for business7.
The original Valley Girl represented a similar earning power in the 1980s while also being culturally disdained for seeming “dumb.” Young, suburban women who threw their middle-class income into shopping every single weekend were considered signs of a healthy economic landscape: job creation across stores and food courts, patrons who steadily frequented the same stores. The Valley Girl was such a capitalist fantasy come to life that as the shopping mall began to face financial hardships in the 1990s, much handwringing in the San Fernando Valley explicitly focused on luring her back. Three separate multi-million dollar mall renovations, the Galleria in Sherman Oaks, the Topanga Plaza, and the Sherman Oaks Fashion Square, cost over $55 million dollars collectively trying to refresh the mall specifically for the Valley Girl’s new, adult life stages. Even the way the mall renovations were reported took on the language of a young woman’s body, describing a “make-over” or a forthcoming “face lift” to ensure that these shopping centers were “more attractive” and “more profitable.” She is commerce and commerce is her.
The spending power of middle-class white girls aside, this isn’t an outsized economic strategy. In modern history, young women and girls have proved to be powerful narratives to sell products. The reason “Get Ready With Me” videos became a “booming TikTok genre”8 (with origins in YouTube as far back as the 2000s) is the same reason teenage valley girl Moon Unit Zappa was plucked to do press for her father’s album in 1982. Capitalism often sees and presents young women and girls as commodities; in these landscapes, to consume narratives about their lives is to consume the products they share. Their interaction, across the free market, is felt as seamless because they are ultimately both metabolized as products.
The Valley Girl, the mall’s influencer, frankly, has vastly expanded her reach in the last two decades
This consumption is markedly American: a way to spend (or earn) your way into security and happiness as its own kind of jingoism. To that end, the Valley Girl has always represented a distinctly American dream, an ability to live and exist in a middle-class enclave with enough disposable income to recreationally and habitually shop, divorced entirely from basic need. Her hallmarks—white, able-bodied, conventionally pretty and gendered, and married to capitalism—represent an American experience that is often presented as both exclusive and aspirational. In 2024, filmmaker Faye Tsakas posed the same line of thinking with her short documentary on girl influencers, positing “How Being an Influencer Became a New American Dream.” In documenting the lives of 11- and 12-year-old influencers in rural Alabama, Tsakas observed in The New York Times:
In a time of immense wealth disparity, influencer culture has created a more fantastical kind of American dream. (Perhaps that’s why nearly one-third of preteens say becoming an influencer is a career goal.) Seeing the field’s potential for a steady income — not to mention the prestige of an ever-growing follower count — some parents encourage it.9
As the influencer market continues to grow, it’s really no wonder that the shopping mall has epically died in 2026. The Valley Girl, the mall’s influencer, frankly, has vastly expanded her reach in the last two decades, no longer tethered to any mere building. The Valley Girl has taken her affect, her class, her consumption, and her lifestyle straight to your phone. Like, follow, and subscribe.🌴
Next week: the incarcerated valley girls.
🧁In April, Valley Girl will celebrate her first birthday. Our girl is an Aries. To commemorate the occasion, I will be launching a paid tier of Valley Girl that month that will put some pieces behind a paywall. I’ll also be launching Office Hours, a weekly video meeting with me to discuss the week’s essay with paid subscribers. To enjoy uninterrupted content and all forthcoming features, please be sure to “pledge” a paid subscription.
Thank you to my first pledges: Barbara Smith, Trish Bendix, and Camille Perri.
Yu, Zoe. “Today’s ‘Skinny Influencers’ Are Selling Something More Mind-Bending Than Weight Loss.” The New York Times Magazine, 9 Feb. 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/magazine/skinny-influencer-weight-loss-ozempic.html. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.
Uppercase “Valley Girl” to indicate the manufactured caricature.
Lowercase “valley girl” to indicate a female-identified or pangender individual who happens to be from or inhabits the San Fernando Valley.
Inskeep, Steve, and Leila Fadel. “Do You Have ‘TikTok Voice’? It’s OK If You Don’t Want to Get Rid of It.” NPR, 1 Feb. 2024. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1228067629
As opposed to, say, racist, ableist, classist, heteronormative, colorist, or capitalistic critique.
Navarro, J.G. Statista, 2025, Global Influencer Marketing Value 2015-2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092819/global-influencer-market-size/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.
20 Surprising Influencer Marketing Statistics, Digital Marketing Institute, 16 Apr. 2025, https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/20-influencer-marketing-statistics-that-will-surprise-you. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.
Herzlich, Taylor. “Why ‘Get Ready With Me’ Videos Have Become a Booming TikTok Genre.” TODAY, 16 May 2023, https://www.today.com/popculture/get-ready-with-me-grwm-videos-trend-rcna84166. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.
Tsakas, Faye. “How Being an Influencer Became a New American Dream.” The New York Times, 10 Dec. 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/opinion/child-influencers-consumerism.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.