Gen Z’s pickle obsession is very Millennial
It’s giving epic bacon.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
I went on Offline With Jon Favreau to talk about opinion fatigue, digital footprints, and how to make being online more bearable. Listen or watch! —Kate
If there’s one thing TikTok will do, it’s sell out an unexpected item. A viral pasta recipe resulted in unprecedented demand for Feta cheese in 2021, and I personally fell victim to the Birkenstock Boston clog shortage of 2022. But I had to double and then triple check the app’s most recent obsession, because I thought for a second I was being subjected to a Zepotha-type joke: It’s a $44 pickle sweatshirt.
The sweatshirt is from an online boutique called Bad Addiction, which the founder describes on TikTok as a “boutique for hot mess anxious moms.” But one particular product, a sweatshirt featuring a screen printing of various brands of pickles jars, has found success with the TikTok demographic. The boutique’s TikTok videos featuring the sweatshirt started getting millions of views as early as January, but in the past few months things really picked up, with videos getting tens of millions of views. Other creators began ordering and posting about the shirt, quickly selling it out.
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The timing of this explosion lines up with the launch of TikTok Shop, which has made purchasing the latest viral item even easier. The Washington Post just wrote about it in the context of the sweatshirt. But I don’t think that entirely explains why people have gone so batty for what amounts to basic merch. Rather, the sweatshirt’s popularity reflects Gen Z’s larger obsession with pickles.
Once you notice this, you’ll start seeing pickles everywhere. Videos of creators sloppily crunching their way through pickles from a jar often rack up hundreds of thousands if not millions of views on TikTok, and casual references to how much someone loves pickles have started appearing out of nowhere.
I’m sure Shein is likely making a $4 dupe of the Bad Addiction sweatshirt as we speak, and soon pickle jewelry and other paraphernalia is going to start showing up at Urban Outfitters.
If this sounds eerily familiar to you, it’s because you’re a Millennial who lived through epic bacon.
In the 2000s, bacon mania swept the United States, starting with the creation of blogs like Heather Lauer’s “Bacon Unwrapped.” But like pickles today, bacon left the fridge and infiltrated our shopping.
“I stumbled into a zany online world of bacon-related wackiness,” Sarah Hepola wrote in Salon in 2008. “Bacon clothing, bacon accessories, bacon jewelry, bacon toilet paper. The vegans may get their own bestselling cookbook, the yuppies may get their raw organic walnut oil at Whole Foods, but carnivores have turned bacon into something more than mere food; it has become a fashion statement.”
There was bacon stunt cuisine, like bacon ice cream and bacon bubble gum. There were bacon Band Aids, bacon rolling papers, even a bacon alarm clock. Today, they’re cringey Millennial relics starting to slowly decompose in landfills.
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Left unchecked, Gen Z’s pickle obsession will meet the same fate, times ten. Brands waste no time hopping on even the most vague TikTok trend cycles, so something as straightforward as pickles is going to reach overexposure even faster. I would try to help, to do my part to stop the pickle mania, but in the words of another TikTok trend: I cannot interfere. It’s a canon event.