IT’S GIRL is a speculative branding project satirising girl trends and the girlification of today's culture. The brand and its subsequent products are explorations into the nuanced relationship between women and the way they are currently being represented and perceived in society, as well as how they are representing and perceiving themselves. With the brand book and products making the ethos and values of girl trends explicit, Bianca brings the debate over these girl trends, whether they are ultimately good or bad for women, to the forefront.

Could you talk about the focus of your work? What are you trying to achieve in the work that you're doing?

The focus of my project is recent girl trends in the year 2023, and what's led up to it, such as past precedents of female-centric trends and movements online, and in culture, and what this new iteration says about society today.

The work that I did was a satirical brand book for a fictional girl brand that represents girl trends today. What I intended to do with it is to literalise or put into literal terms what girl trends are doing to society, which is rebranding society to be more 'girl'. By literalizing it, we can see it very plainly and see its intentions, the philosophy behind it, and how it shapes everything more easily. Through a brand book, you write out the brand's history, you write out the brand's morals and values and their brand goals and missions. Using that structure to talk about girl trends makes it easier to critique it and see it clearly.

Since this whole girlification of culture has been really big in 2023, what critiques do you personally have with the whole thing? Or what are you happy about from that whole trend?

Why I felt it was so important to make it literal is because it is difficult to critique it when it feels very fun and it's something that unifies a lot of people. A lot of people got on board with it; it has become a really big cultural movement centred around and created by women. It was a lot of fun to participate in, but it also just masked bigger issues in the world and didn't really create any tangible changes that needed to be made.

Other than the brand book, what are the other surrounding outcomes?

I made girl products out of the brand book so the products are criticisms of different aspects of girlification. One of them is girl painkillers, which critiques how we trivialise mental illness or health in general. It's double-edged because a lot of taglines for these girl painkillers are 'medication made for women', but in fact there is a gap in the market for medication that's actually designed for women in mind. Why does it have to be pink? And why is the backcopy not giving you all the real details?

Another product is girl dinner bars to playoff girl dinner, which is fun, easy and super relatable that we all just like to eat crappy dinner sometimes. It normalises not eating healthy or maybe not eating a lot, where instead of even having dinner, you just eat a granola bar. And their names are really silly, so one of them is called Granola Girl, which is an aesthetic trend. Another is Almond Mom, and then the last is Protein Maxing, a protein bar.

The last product I have is an AI helper called It's Your Girl. It's like ChatGPT. There's a gap in the AI market for one that is very female coded; a lot of them are friendly but gender neutral. So mine talks like a girl, and all of the responses lead you back to, you should just treat yourself to a sweet treat. Within that, I also have girlsplain with different suggestions that AI generators usually have. For example, you could say girlsplain to me the news, so it basically dumbs it down to the most digestible terms for 'girls' to understand and they are accompanied by emoji summarizations. Those are the products that I came up with in the brand book.