Why is everyone suddenly talking about cheugy style?

Once upon a time (2013), a student at Beverly Hills High School by the name of Gaby Rasson added a new word to the teen lexicon: cheugy. Now 23, the gen-Zer had succeeded in wryly encapsulating the outmoded trappings of the millennial lifestyle in two syllables. Cheugy (it’s pronounced chew-gee) encompasses everything from excruciating email greetings such as ‘Happy Friyay’ to interiors (terrazzo surfaces) and entertainment (Friends: The Reunion).

Certain typefaces (‘lobster’) are cheugy, as are the types of photos that millennials sometimes post on Instagram (the ones where all the subjects have their arms linked, backs to the camera wearing matching T-shirts). At the time of writing, Instagram account @CheugLife had also added ‘proms’ and ‘bachelor pads’ to the list. Boomerangs are cheugy. Having (or using the term) ‘Instagram boyfriend’ is cheugier still. Yelling at them in public for not getting the shot is the cheugiest of all.

So, how did a term cooked up by an American high schooler end up spreading like internet wildfire? Well, as The New York Times explains, ‘cheugy’ first took hold among Rasson’s friendship group, before graduating with them to various college campuses. The 2021 spike—which is happening on (and because of) TikTok thanks to LA-based creator Hallie Cain’s viral elucidation of what cheuginess actually is, and a flood of other videos that mock the cheugier sides of life—is actually playing catch up on a satirical social movement that’s now around eight years old. Meaning that the current cheugy wave is itself, ironically, pretty cheugy.

Those bullet-pointed articles you’ve no doubt already come across that definitive label “live, laugh, love” signage as the ultimate endpoint of ‘cheugy’ aren’t it, however. In reality, the spike in awareness of cheuginess is far more nuanced—it succeeds in holding a mirror up to the times that we’re living in, as even the most entrenched capitalist ways face fresh scrutiny from the under 24s.

Beyond semantics or comedic effect, the reason ‘cheugy’ hits the virtual nail on the head is that it delineates the aftermath of the aggressive consumerist marketing that millennials, as a generation, endured. Social commentators who alleged, back in 2017, that those born between 1981 and 1996 consumed avocado toast en masse, while wearing designer sneakers, and paid through the nose for self-care experiences in Pepto-Bismol pink surroundings, didn’t foresee that homogeneity itself would become a generational battleground between the world’s younger echelons.