From the alluring mystery of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides to the glittery melancholy of Euphoria, pop culture has long been captivated by the sad girl trope.
This cultural obsession with the wounded woman isn’t confined to Hollywood. It’s everywhere — in literature, film, and music — and now repackaged through curated aesthetics that reduce complex female identities into bite-sized performances.
The sad girl trope is a cultural archetype based on a woman defined by her tragic yet glamorized existence, according to So Textual. She has a sound, a look, a style — a detached manner of speaking, a distant gaze, and an ethereal melancholy about her. She embodies a sense of mystery, akin to the manic pixie dream girl, which has led to her widespread influence in Gen Z media, fashion, and culture.
How Sad Girl Cinema Became its Own Genre
The Virgin Suicides, Girl, Interrupted, Thirteen, Gone Girl, and Black Swan are staples of the “sad girl” genre as they give young women a sense of validation. With only 16% of the top-grossing films in 2024 directed by women, according to the 2024 Celloid Ceiling Report, it’s no surprise that young women seek out films that reflect their lived experiences.
Historically, women’s suffering has been dismissed as mere biological hysteria. Consequently, a collective relief exists in being understood by artists, poets, and filmmakers who are deemed prestigious and serious — it feels good to be acknowledged. However, this raises an important question: Are we being reflected or simply mirroring the image projected onto us?
Film directors often use dreamy cinematography, soft angelic lighting, and carefully curated styling to visualize pain as something enchanting rather than raw. A prime example is Sofia Coppola’s signature shot of a tragic heroine gazing out of a window. In these scenes, the focus is never on what’s outside the window; it’s always on her lingering stare.
Coppola’s cinematic work established her as a cultural icon of this generation, particularly known for her famous sad girl characterization — a passive figure who drifts through sorrow without ever confronting its deeper systemic or personal roots. While her tears may be genuine, they often lead to nothing more than a picturesque camera shot. These all-too-common depictions frame pain as an alluring aspect of femininity, reducing female characters to beautifully tragic figures. Beyond their cathartic tragedy, I often ask myself: Who are these women?
Watching Coppola’s Priscilla made me realize what’s often missing in this genre of sad girl media: real change in their life. It’s striking that when Priscilla finally makes a bold choice to leave Elvis by the end of the film, the credits roll to black. Much like many of Coppola’s tragic heroines, she isn’t a girl who makes things happen — she’s a girl who life happens to.
Hollywood, beyond Coppola, has a history of reducing female characters to vessels of suffering to strip them of agency. The award-winning film Blonde sacrificed historical accuracy for a voyeuristic portrayal of Marilyn Monroe’s trauma. Or take the beloved Twilight series. Bella Swan’s identity is almost entirely consumed by her obsession with Edward Cullen to the point she is in a nearly catatonic state after he leaves in Twilight New Moon.
Similarly, in popular television series like Euphoria or The Idol, the character’s delicate fashion, excessive glitter, and kaleidoscopic lighting veil their mental illness with visual aesthetics.
The origins of this trope predominantly center on white women, with only 25% of the 100 top-grossing films of 2024 featuring women of colour in lead roles. It’s exciting to see female directors explore girlhood on the big screen, but it leaves much to be desired, with a vast majority of women still unrepresented in film.
The sad girl trope disappoints, not just because she has been diminished into an aesthetic but because she has become a foil to the “Girl Boss” trope that preceded it. These female characters are turned into symbols, like accessories to an aesthetic, rather than living people with rich inner lives.
How Gen Z is Transforming the Sad Girl into a Cultural Movement
Beyond the cinematic universe of sad girl characters, it has manifested into an aesthetic and cultural movement. Tumblr became the official hub for glamorized female suffering, giving rise to soft grunge and sad girl aesthetics in the early 2010s.
At Tumblr’s peak, Lana Del Rey reigned supreme, becoming the blueprint that every Tumblr girl wanted. Many tried to embody her lyrics from the iconic 2010s sad girl album Ultraviolence, such as the line “He hit me, and it felt like a kiss.”
Mental illness became a performative aesthetic during this time — depression was viewed as a mark of intellect, ADHD was seen as quirkiness, and eating disorders were turned into fashion statements.
Although Tumblr eventually banned certain types of content, the “beautiful suffering” aesthetic continued to spread beyond the platform. Remnants of Tumblr live on through TikTok and Instagram trends like Coquette Core, which blends hyper-feminine elements like pink ribbons, lace, and ballet flats. While it has carved an exclusive subculture, the Coquette community has faced criticism for its lack of diversity and encouragement of disordered eating.
There is even an official Sad Girl Starter Pack playlist on Spotify with over a million likes. The aesthetic of melancholy has become so curated that even emotional distress has been transformed into a beauty trend — just look at the “crying makeup” craze.
This obsession with sadness isn’t limited to music and makeup, though. Female writers such as Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh have gone viral on BookTok, with many young readers romanticizing finding the suffering and tragedy within their words as though they were an aspirational feat.
It’s telling that hashtags like #sadgirl are amassing millions of likes on social media platforms each year, and these aesthetics simplify a more significant issue. Today, the sad girl has been rebranded into a mix of social archetypes and buzzwords. The clean girl, cottage-core girl, manic pixie dream girl, and cool girl all simplify the complexity of womanhood while the same social pressures live on — creating yet another exhausting archetype for young women to compare themselves to.
While this branding capitalizes on suffering, it must remain presentable; too much raw female pain is simply not marketable to the male gaze. Some may view it as a healthy form of expression, but ultimately, it turns pain into an outer performance — one that encourages perpetual dwelling. The sad girl glorifies withdrawal instead of resistance, wrapping passivity in the context of female oppression with a pretty bow.