Friendship Bracelets Have Become An Appropriate Thing For An Adult To Purchase In 2023

There is a 46-year-old woman in Oklahoma who sells friendship bracelets under the alias PigtailsandPixiDust. She claims to have made $16,000 from selling them to the Taylor Swift fans who – when not causing 2.3 magnitude earthquakes – have spent the majority of the musician’s tour trading and collecting multicoloured bangles. Based on a 2022 lyric from “You’re On Your Own Kid”, where Swift implores the listener to “Make the friendship bracelets” and “Take the moment and taste it,” fans will pile them so high that their forearms begin to resemble rigged-out orthopaedic casts.

This, combined with the handmade bracelets that the Lionesses wore during the World Cup, have seen searches for “friendship bracelets” increase by 108 per cent in the past three months alone. These explicit endorsements of female friendship have proven a tacit symbol of camaraderie and sisterhood. Even women-led media companies are selling them as merchandise so that insiders can feel part of a tight-knit cabal. It’s cute and it’s inoffensive, and perhaps the logical – if not mad – conclusion of an arts and crafts aesthetic that has seen charm necklaces and gum-textured earrings proliferate the mainstream.

But there’s also an infantilisation happening within broader culture that might have guided us into a moment where friendship bands feel like an appropriate thing for an adult to purchase. Think of the ways in which the traditional mantles of adulthood are systematically denied: through home ownership (or the lack thereof) and the dominance of the Barbie movie and the reproduction of “girl” trends and the misappropriation of therapeutic language to avoid conflict and the resurgence of stuffed animals and that one Heinz advert in which cartoon animals proclaim that “adulting sucks”. Even Taylor Swift encourages her listeners to fantasise about prom queens and pet cats and high-school romances.

If politics and consumerism treats people as lesser than adults (pre-teen, teen, and young women are more likely than ever to listen to the same music and watch the same films) then even thirty-something Swifties can put on a friendship bracelet and retreat into a pseudo-childhood. Being a “smol bean” is likely a fun reprieve from the anxieties around “adulting”, hence all the celebrities with ribboned pigtails who dress in lace-trimmed pyjama shorts and Mary Jane brogues.

And here’s the problem: You can read the runes of just about any social moment on clothing if you are cynical enough. After all, what is the difference between a mass-produced T-shirt purchased in a stadium and a friendship bracelet purchased on the internet? One is perhaps merch, and the other “girl merch”: a souvenir from a shared place of self-actualisation and silliness, where people can release themselves from the yoke of adulthood. At a time when both Swift and the Lionesses have broken records in their respective fields, friendship bracelets are the ultimate token of fandom and eternal girlhoods. A backslide into adolescence might also be a step towards feeling.