🟧 European summer redux
Fetishizing the Mediterranean for content.
More on the summer vacation front: TikTok is still embracing the mediterranean aesthetic, but now it’s intermingled with anxious American escapism.
Kyle Chayka: Every late spring for the past few years, European summer starts on my Instagram and TikTok feeds. People start posting from new beaches in Italy and Greece, all but demanding DMs requesting the location tag. 2025 is no different. But we’re into our first Trump 2 summer vacation and everything is a little more frantic. Like, if you travel somewhere maybe you should just move there permanently?? Or, will passport control search your phone for anti-Trump sentiment when you come back?
On TikTok, there are two new directions. Some videos cast the Mediterranean Sea to Charli xcx’s frenetic track “Everything Is Romantic”, which of course includes the lyrics “Early nights in white sheets with lace curtains / Capri in the distance”. Others do this recent meme “this was the whole point”, which shows idyllic scenes that, in contrast to working in an office, are at the core of life. Notwithstanding the wave of far-right fascism everywhere, at least in France you’d worry less about the government being dismantled. I reported out and wrote an essay on this “eurocore” trend in 2023, which continues below.
The southern European coastline has taken over my TikTok feed. There are clips of the pastel-colored townhouses of Positano in Italy, “gatorade water” beaches on the French Riviera, terrace dinners on Greek islands, train rides from Nice to Monaco, and even empty stretches of sand in Croatia and Albania. It’s a generic wash of seaside videos; it doesn’t matter so much where they are from so long as they have sun, sand, water, and artfully arranged platters of raw seafood. Many of these videos are hashtagged #europeancore or #eurocore. In TikTok argot, the suffix -core appended to a word turns it into a signifier for a cohesive aesthetic. Thus, Eurocore is Europe as a style that anyone can participate in — in other words, Europe as a meme. Tara Torcaso, an event designer in Newport Beach, California, who posted her own eurocore TikToks from Saint Tropez, told me: “People are either going to Europe, or if they’re not going, they’re trying to find a piece of Europe at home, with their decor or throwing a party.”
Eurocore is “the romanticization of life in the Mediterranean,” Ingrid Martins de Barros, a fashion consultant in Brazil, told me. She continued, “It's about being immersed in culture, well-being, and beauty, with no other concerns than enjoying the summer.” She said that Brazilian influencers have been pursuing the trend, too, even though it’s winter in the southern hemisphere. Aesthetics like eurocore are combinations of disparate symbols and signifiers; like playing dress-up, you can try a few on even if you’re not literally living the trend.
“Tomato Girl Summer” is another label for the eurocore look. Participants put on makeup to look a bit like the seasonal fruit that everyone makes into sandwiches: a base layer of terracotta blush with pops of red on the cheeks and forehead. It’s a visual suggestion of “being outside, sun-kissed, maybe in your garden or out by the water,” Janet Ribando, a beauty TikTok creator in New York, told me. “People want to feel like they’re somewhere else.” Ribando wore the look during a trip to Seattle. “I would love to do the Tomato Girl in actual Italy,” she said. The great thing is that you can be eurocore anywhere. Some influencers in Virginia embraced it by turning off their air conditioning — just like Paris. Amalfi coast-themed dinners have become popular with Torcaso’s event-planning clients. “I feel like my life year-round is eurocore,” she said. Having a vermouth on your balcony at 5 PM? Eurocore. So is walking to get a gelato after dinner.
Eurocore is a kind of game, a way of experiencing the world that becomes participatory and shareable through the multimedia space of TikTok, which is a machine for turning life into real-time digital content. Lately I’ve been thinking of such affective filters of reality as “moods.” This is not original; first, it’s already slang: Europe is such a mood, meaning that European lifestyle has a strong vibe, it’s aspirational, we like it. But the German philosopher Heidegger thought a lot about moods in the early 20th century, too. He described human existence as “being-in-the-world” and a “mood” as a way of being. Heidegger wrote, in a translation by William Blattner, “A mood is a way, not merely a form or a mode, but rather a manner, like a melody… it attunes and determines the manner of his being.”
A mood makes you interface with your surroundings differently. The TikTokers documenting themselves wading into the sea, reading by the beach, drinking espresso, and riding Vespas for the sake of #eurocore are live-action role-playing Europeanness, in Europe. Which is, of course, what tourists have been doing for centuries. In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American novelist whose ex-pat lifestyle would have presented quite well on social media, described the Mediterranean as “a playground for the world.”
TikTok makes it easy to participate in the ambient vibe of a place, to exist within a chosen mood, without engaging as much with physical reality. It’s a bit like the experience of playing Pokémon GO in its heyday. You walk around the physical world, but your mind is in the digital overlay, engaging with the monsters that exist only on your screen. The conversation you are participating in, even the primary experience that you are having, exists there, online. You’re not eating; you’re having Girl Dinner. You’re not cleaning your kitchen; you are taverncore. Your family isn’t rich; you’re just a coastal grandmother. The mood makes real life more interesting, or at least interweaves it more with life online, where feedback is instantaneous and it’s easier to keep score.
There has been an actual jump in European tourism, too; it’s not just a TikTok phenomenon. In part it’s due to the pandemic recovery. “Many of these trips were in gestation for three years, and Europe is benefiting as a result,” Rafat Ali, the founder and C.E.O. of the travel-industry publication Skift, told me. “It also has a feeling of a last hurrah from pandemic saving before people hunker down,” he said. A recent article in The Guardian observed that Australian tourists are also increasingly turning to classical European grand tours instead of, say, backpacking through Southeast Asia, almost twice as many as two decades ago. Everyone wants to go on vacation, and nothing seems to epitomize vacation more than a rented beach chair beneath a striped umbrella in front of turquoise-blue sea.
The French and Italian Riviera regions in particular have an aura of old money and “quiet luxury,” another aesthetic TikTok has been fascinated by since the stars of Succession donned cashmere baseball caps and congregated on yachts. In fact, the rich and famous have been summering in these destinations for centuries, if not millennia. Emperor Tiberius had a pleasure villa built on the Italian island of Capri in 26 C.E., establishing a trend among ancient Roman elites. The ruins of a villa preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius were found underneath Positano’s Church of St. Maria Assunta in 2004. These destinations are the tourism equivalent of the ongoing dining obsession with burgers and martinis: pure, nigh-universal pleasure. You can’t argue with them. (Maybe the Mediterranean mania is the 2020s’ update to the 2000s’ Under the Tuscan Sun, but driven by user-generated videos rather than a single memoir or film.)
Thus, some travelers get upset when it’s not so simple or frictionless. Physical reality intrudes on their eurocore moods. There are also TikTok videos of tourists cramming into overcrowded buses, dragging their suitcases up the streets of precipitous hillside towns, and queuing in single file to take clear photos of Santorini rooftops. They complain that Europe is maybe a little too European, too real. But after all, these geographical places aren’t just fodder for a mood. They resist being turned into pure digital content to be consumed.
I talked to some tourism professionals in Italy to see what they made of this new wave. Elizabeth Minchilli, an American author, tour planner, and prolific TikToker who has lived in Rome and Umbria for more than 30 years, told me that she saw more tourists planning their trips based on social media. “People are getting their travel advice from TikTok. If they see someone who looks like them in a beautiful place doing something delicious, they’re more likely to save it,” she said. You might see one of Minchilli’s idyllic videos of an Umbrian farmhouse luncheon, or one of the photographer Sam Youkilis’s beatific Instagram clips of cliff diving in Ravello and decide you just have to go there and do that thing. The copycat effect isn’t resulting in ideal travel. “Positano sucks,” Minchilli said. “It sucks in that there’s no easy way to get there. I’ve been telling people not to go to Positano for at least six years now.”
“Eurocore” is a misnomer because “Europe” does not just consist of getting a gelato. “People think Italy is one destination, or Europe is one destination. Europe is not a country; Italy is barely a country,” Minchilli said. It follows a certain American brand of consumerism: Travel is defined by replicating a photo of Lake Como that you saw on Instagram, rather than engaging more deeply with the history or specificity of a place, much less the actual residents. As Agnes Crawford, a British tour guide in Rome, described the tourists’ approach, “On your holiday, you can’t just lounge about and see what’s what; you have to go to the place that people went to, otherwise you’re missing out.” Crawford continued, “There’s a certain kind of lack of imagination in wanting to go to the same place as as everyone else.”
So what do we want from eurocore if not Europe? I think it’s more like an attitude, a lifestyle — the mood rather than its source. I asked Tara Torcaso, the event planner, what she found so appealing about it. She said that when she was traveling in France and Italy, everyone around her just seemed to be more present, more engaged in their own lives. “People aren’t just sitting on their phones and taking pictures. They really are in the moment with things,” she said. That mood of being offline, fully immersed in drinking wine and chatting with a friend on a seaside terrace, ironically makes for the best online content. Other people, like me, want to consume it because that sense of analog experience is so desirable at the moment — even though by mainlining it through our phones we might be missing the point. Elizabeth Minchilli compared it to the local Italian ethos of dolce far niente, embracing the pleasure of doing nothing. “The hashtags are an attempt by tourists to capture this lifestyle,” she said. “They don’t alway get it right, but that’s ok. At least they’re trying.”
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