Alice Coster: The big pop culture moments of 2023 — and those we won’t miss
From Prince Harry to Barbiecore to the Voice, 2023 was marked with cultural moments and viral trends. Here’s what was big this year and what we’ll be glad to wave goodbye to.
Opinion
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Barbenheimer, stealth wealth, cozzie livs, ludicrously capacious bag, Prince Harry’s frozen peen, Crocs comeback, the coronation, Matildas madness, that guy on the Chiefs.
Safe to say 2023 brought us plenty of cultural moments and even more viral trends we are glad to see the back of – think sheer everything, Barbiecore, diabetic turned weight loss drug Ozempic and bleached eyebrows.
As Term 4 crawls to a close, the care factor has been chucked out the window at drop-off, along with the once carefully packed school lunches, uniforms and obsession with sports drink Prime.
It’s all mismatched socks, broken tupperware and squeezing into too-small sportsgear, as we grunt and groan to the finish line.
The grind was real, with the best way to tune out doom scrolling and deep diving into the cultural Zeitgeist. Think Donald Trump’s mug shot, Selena’s blanket, or devouring every column inch about Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski trial.
It was somewhere between Paltrow’s courtroom wardrobe and nepo baby (remember all that fuss?!) Sofia Richie’s wedding, which saw the rise of the term “stealth wealth” or “quiet luxury”. The buzz phrase was actually birthed around 2008 during the global financial crisis when it became unfashionable for the ultra-wealthy to show off their assets brazenly. But it took on whole new meaning and PR spin in 2023 as TV series Succession (whose odious character Tom Wambsgans snarled the expression “ludicrously capacious bag” which became a trend in itself) aired its final season and became the water cooler content we all needed.
On the flip side, “cozzie livs”, was crowned the 2023 word of the year by Macquarie Dictionary. The very Australian play on the term “cost of living” struck a chord amid rampant price rises and soaring interest rates.
“What could be a more Australian approach to a major social and economic problem than to treat it with a bit of humour and informality?” the Macquarie committee said.
Other winning words came straight from the Gen Z playbook, like “rizz”, short for charisma.
Phenomena across the sporting, political and pop culture fields shape our conversations.
We all tuned into the Matildas’ thrilling World Cup ride on home soil.
Talking about the Voice referendum or Brittany Higgins at the family dinner table could cause robust debate. But plenty poo-poo pop culture, which is really just a “cozzie livs” term for popular culture.
Isn’t there always someone in the group who will curl their lip and say “who” when discussing the ins and outs of that power couple photo move from Bey and Tay, or why Travis Kelce from the Chiefs is Swift’s ideal man.
For many, chatting about Scandoval (IYKYK), Samantha Jones’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it return on And Just Like That, or even the Met Gala cockroach, is all considered a bit “lowbrow.”
Years and years have gone by keeping my closet pop culture obsession at bay, only discussing with like-minded friends on text about “why Britney Spears always looks sunburnt” to “Paris Hilton shouldn’t be mum-shamed for not changing her baby’s nappy for a whole month”.
But who wasn’t secretly delighted when the year began with Prince Harry refusing to stop talking about his frost-bitten penis in his memoir Spare.
There was so much to unpack from Rihanna’s half time Superbowl performance — from her pregnancy to breast plates definitely becoming a red-carpet celeb trend. And who is also closetedly watching re-runs of Friends after the death of Chandler, aka Matthew Perry.
Some try too hard to enter the Zeitgeist. Kim Kardashian’s Skims “nipple bra”, a push up bra with in-built nipples that make you look perpetually high beamed – once a serious fashion faux pas in high school – hasn’t taken off (quite yet).
Ugly shoes like Crocs have made a comeback. While the whole big boot thing, namely the MSCHF red Astro Boy boot, or those space shoes worn by Kanye, is hopefully over. Although Balenciaga, which announced Nicole Kidman as the brand’s new ambassador, have moved on from their pantaboots to releasing a high-heeled chunky Ugg (yes you read that right).
It’s all swings and roundabouts with a fare dose of nostalgia thrown in for good measure. Barbenheimer was one of the year’s most Google searched terms, coined after movies Barbie and Oppenheimer were both released on the same day. Meanwhile, “method dressing”, where actors take aspects of their film and apply it to their red-carpet ensembles was very 2023, but felt more like a slick gimmicky marketing tool, think Margot Robbie’s Barbiecore, to the more tenuous “mermaidcore” from The Little Mermaid release and most recently Wonka’s Timothee Chalamet dressing like a giant chocolate bar.
It’s been some kind of a ride 2023, but let’s be honest, we’re ready for new terms, fads and trends and hopefully maybe even a word of the year we’ve all actually used.
Alice Coster is a Herald Sun columnist
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