Long gone are the Brats, the Barbenheimers, and the Hot Girls of summers past. In place of any unifying summer vibe to precede fall 2025, it seems, this season was a gaping nothingness. We’ve had performative males who think holding a book and reading it are one in the same, Labubu-fueled hordes looking to pick a fight, and really bad (and really good) denim ad campaigns. Though, these were a few of the more recognizable moments of the last three brainrotted, sweltering months, not a collective feeling we could all rally around. Ultimately, there was no single phrase touted online and in-person, slapped across baby tees or bumper stickers. It was, indeed, the vibeless summer.
“It’s so weird. It totally was so vibeless, it didn’t feel like summer to me,” student André Rodriguez Tavera, 19, tells Teen Vogue. “It just felt like my life happening without school. I don’t know.”
Tavera is far from the only one who noticed. Across the many pockets of the internet, people noted there was no summer song, no one thing that could incite a club crowd into the passioned chaos that last summer’s “Apple” or “Espresso” could. If summer 2025 was an anthem, Tavera thinks it would have been either “Life Goes On,” by The Sundays or “Somewhere in Between,” by Blood Orange — two songs rife with weighty questions that aren’t all that easy to answer.
For 17-year-old student and garment designer Kevin Wallace, a vibelessness was most evident in how this summer’s culture failed to seep into fashion.
“When it came to Barbie, there was that ‘I Am Kenough’ sweater or whatever, as well as actual Barbie toys,” Wallace says. “But this summer, there wasn’t really a direct translation between what we were consuming online to something that we could wear.”
The closest thing to a collective energy Wallace could catch this summer was Love Island USA and its sweeping viewership. “People were telling me to watch it and I was just brushing it off, and then I actually watched it and I couldn’t stop,” he admits.
After each episode, Wallace and his friends intently debriefed, often over Korean barbeque, and thus an unexpected routine was born. Tavera’s summer habits involved countless DIY shows, staged everywhere from local restaurants to basements and backyards.
“People can’t really afford to go to bars, so they find other third spaces to create community,” Tavera says. “I mean, I just graduated high school and I think that’s what motivated a lot of the going to shows and meeting new people: when you’re trying to find yourself as an adult, you stop being afraid of talking to people who you would never have [before].”
For designer and student Emoji Angel, 22, much of her season was spent traveling between the United States and Europe for her master’s degree in environmental law, caught in between the scenes of southern America and Paris. “If last summer was two beats, this summer was one,” she explains of the heightened dancey feeling that life is moving way faster than it should be.
One overarching tone, however, stands out to Angel, of Atlanta’s artistic landscape in the aftermath of Stop Cop City. “A lot of emotional labor went into that movement and for it to just go nowhere, it was so disappointing,” she reflects on its concerted efforts to save the city’s Weelaunee Forest from the 85-acre policing facility that opened in April. She reaffirms that energy is not all gone, though, and sees the city’s hardcore music scene as a response, drawing even younger crowds who didn’t get to directly experience the movement but feel its deep frustration reverberating still. If the summer were a color, to Angel, it was a loud neon blue. The fall, on the other hand, will be reddish-brown rust: a slow, earthen process that itself is a form of creation.
Across the board, the trio of young people look to autumn as a season of anticipation: of focusing on their craft and means of self expression, whether that be style, community organizing, or a mix of both. If summer was the time for testing the waters, then fall 2025 is the moment to really dive into one’s creative output and broader environment, not without shedding some old routines and picking up new ones.
“I’m probably entering my creation phase. Am I going to be studying? I’ve been trying to tap into different people I find inspiring,” she speaks of the recent rabbit hole of Karl Lagerfeld interviews and book chapters she’s dived into. “I just want to do stuff that takes a long time,” she continues, balancing what she’s learning with what she’s actually making. “I made very quick and simple garments this summer, but I would love to do something that’s intricate and takes hours, so I can look at the end and realize I put all my effort into it.”
For Tavera, perhaps it was change that shaped the summer.
“I said goodbye to a lot of people, but I met a lot of people as well. I graduated. It was a lot of transitioning, and I think that’s what made the summer different: focusing on where I’m going to go in life,” Tavera reflects, as they prepare for their first semester in a foreign city and all the possibilities that come along with one’s world opening up. “You don’t feel fully stagnant. You feel like you’re always moving towards something.”
