The Girls of Summer 17
by Gigi de Amador
There’s something mythical about the summer you turn seventeen. It’s the season that exists in a limbo. No longer the carefree abandon of childhood summers, but not yet the calculated coolness of your twenties.
This is the summer of becoming and it’s messier than any Instagram story suggests.
Walk out into the sun this July and August and you’ll find them: the girls of summer seventeen.
They’re in shop dressing rooms, fluorescent lights casting harsh shadows as they wrestle with bikini straps and the impossible standards of a size inclusive world that still whispers you should be smaller.
They’re sprawled across unmade beds, phones glowing, thumbs scrolling through an endless carousel of bodies that look nothing like theirs yet somehow represent everything they think they should be.
TikTok has become the new magazine rack but instead of flipping through glossy pages, seventeen year olds are served an endless stream of “that girl” content: green smoothies at 6am, pilates routines and skincare regimens that cost more than most teens' summer jobs pay.
The pressure isn’t just to look good, it’s to optimise your entire existence for content creation.
The poolside becomes a photoshoot, every angle calculated, every smile practised. The carefree summer of previous generations has been replaced by a carefully curated highlight reel.
But here’s what the algorithm doesn’t capture: the hormone driven emotional whiplash that defines seventeen. One moment you’re invincible, the next you’re crying in your car for no apparent reason other than ‘summer blues’. This is the age of emotional extremes, when everything feels like the end of the world because in many ways your world as you know it is ending.
Perhaps the most radical act of summer 2025 isn’t the perfect beach body or the viral TikTok dance. Perhaps it’s choosing to be gloriously and messily, human.
Some girls are already leading this quiet revolution, posting photos with cellulite visible, sharing stories about bad skin days, laughing too loudly without caring who’s recording.
So to the girls of summer seventeen: eat the ice cream without photographing it first. Swim without worrying about your mascara. Let your friends take terrible photos of you mid-laugh. Have an organic summer; one where you remember what silence sounds like without AirPods, where you read actual books with pages that turn, where you lie in the grass and watch clouds without the urge to capture them. Rediscover whatever it was that made childhood summers feel endless: the simple magic of boredom that blooms into adventure, conversations that meander without a soundtrack, the particular joy of doing absolutely nothing and calling it everything.
Have a summer that’s messy, imperfect and totally yours. Because in a world obsessed with fake perfection, authenticity and the quiet moments that nurture it, is the real luxury.