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One hates to be a hater, and yet…two short days into the new year—specifically, a year with the third season of The White Lotus on the horizon and, tragically, no Jimmy Carter—I find myself besieged by bullet-point-heavy lists of what absolutely everyone I follow on Instagram does and does not want to carry with them into 2025. I know it’s at least as annoying to complain about other people’s Instagram posts as it is to post annoyingly, but…when did everyone become Massie Block, fearsome alpha-girl protagonist of The Clique books? (If you don’t get this reference, I’m going to assume you weren’t a tween girl in the early aughts and move forward from there.)
I think what bugs me about the ubiquitous “in/out” lists that tend to flood social media this time of year is the idea of people behaving like quasi-royals, and issuing dictates to a besotted populace who might either live or die by their pronouncements. Sorry, but I don’t think anyone really cares that I think bows are “out” and pinstripes are “in” for winter-into-spring 2025, and by that same token, I don’t really care that you’ve deemed Notes-app lists “out” and note-taking by hand “in” this year. Like, are you Susan Sontag? I didn’t think so! (Neither am I, nor will anyone ever be again!)
Student of history that I am, I found myself wondering recently how the “in/out” list became a de facto New Year’s social media tradition, leading me to the seasoned reporter’s natural next move: googling, “how did in out lists start.” Apparently, this particular trend can be traced back to Washington Post fashion editor Nina Hyde, whose late-1970s column “The List” enumerates such items as “ties,” “Princess Leia coils,” and “pirates” in the “in” column—a full two years before Vivienne Westwood’s iconic 1981 pirate collection hit the runway, might I add—and banishing items such as “frizz,” “scarves,” and “gauchos” to the furthest, most Siberian pinnacle of “out.”
The brevity and clarity of Hyde’s annual lists is admirable, and perhaps easiest to liken to Joan Didion’s famous packing list, or Nora Ephron’s poignant “What I’ll miss / what I won’t miss” list, but I think it’s time we honored all three of these women’s memories by keeping the vagaries of our ins and outs to ourselves. Word to the wise: If it’s really “in,” you don’t need to record it for New Year’s posterity, and if it’s “out,” well…why waste any words on it at all?
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