The Pomodoro Girl: A guide to the fashion trend reviving the Mediterranean aesthetic

tomato girl is a trend that comes from the imaginary Mediterranean coast of the 60s, loved and shared on TikTok by Generation Z.

For some “public time” now the romanticization of every moment of everyday life appears as an act with a double meaning: pure self-treatment to appreciate every little moment and not miss the time, but also the ideal tendency to feel even more inclined to share fragments of yourself online. Lighting a candle before bed, keeping a morning diary and many other extreme habits. attentive, mindful contributed, for example, to the formation of the aesthetics of the so-called This girl, the master of balancing productivity and personal time. In the wake of this progressive romanticization of life, fashion takes on an increasingly fundamental role, because the first requirement to talk about your routine is to fully feel yourself. Or rather, perfectly in line with the character you want to embody.

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Let’s mix these spaces, add a pinch of revisited 50s and 60s dress code, set everything to the Mediterranean coastline, and the result is nothing short of this summer’s latest overarching trend: tomato girl. Aesthetics, which, like the very famous This girlcovers all aspects of the day lived, in reality and, above all, online, but it does this and it makes sense to exist exclusively in the warm season. tomato girl – to quote Jostein Gaarder, but without existentialism and with summer fruit – she is someone who spends her days slowly, with cicadas singing in the background, dressed in dresses and Bardot crop tops and/or very light skirts, to be ready dance by the sea at any time.

This is the dream of the Italian Dolce Vita, meeting with nostalgia for times and places not experienced by Generation Z on TikTok, where the reference hashtag has almost 4 million mentions. But what’s with the tomato? While red is often part of the style choice that brings this aesthetic to life, the fruit references are not literal, but rather refer to the imaginary they evoke: a harvest under the sun, an authenticity that belies artificiality, a taste of what is simple yet irreplaceable, like a caprese enjoyed on the beach.. It’s no coincidence that, thanks to the huge uptick in the trend, on Airbnb, the top-selling destinations in the early summer from the US were none other than Amalfi and Sorrento. And here she fantasizes, plans and immortalizes her summer by wearing scarves with a vintage touch, linen look and embroidered or lace details, a la Malena. A set of clichés that no doubt reinforces the stereotype of the Southern Italian who, especially in America, continues to live and flourish in the collective imagination. However, the tomato girl isn’t just the iconic Monica Bellucci in Dolce & Gabbana: she’s also a Jacquemus-clad micro-influencer, a TikTok user with a particularly successful Rouje-signed outfit, or even a nepo baby in Ami Paris.

The merit of this aesthetic is that it freed the cliché of the Mediterranean woman from the space-time in which she seemed to be imprisoned for decades, establishing her dialogue with the modern world and renewing her audacity. With a breath of freshness that only Gen Z has been able to spontaneously instill, and whether they come from Southern Italy, Greece or any other sunny coast. After all, this is purely a dream, what fashion feeds on.

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