Sad Girls in the Club: A Quiet Act of Rebellion

It starts with Lana Del Rey. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it starts with Edith Piaf, or Fiona Apple, or the soft rustle of Sylvia Plath’s pages. But in 2025, the sad girl aesthetic has officially moved beyond the internet and into the club. And she's not crying in the corner—she's spinning beneath neon strobes, eyeliner artfully smudged. In a room full of noise, she’s the quietest thing, and somehow the loudest.

There’s something disarming about how girls today have reclaimed sadness. Whereas past generations were encouraged to smile through it or bury it, this new iteration of young women who have grown up negotiating their feelings through the algorithmic mirror of the internet, wear heartbreak without shame. The “sad girl” has become a cultural shorthand, less about glamorizing actual depression and more about the permission to feel alluringly deeply. 

To feel enormously in public, especially in spaces designed for escape like nightclubs, concerts, and parties, is an act of quiet rebellion. It says: I’m still here, even though sadness has found a home within me. I will dance with my grief.

It’s not new. We’ve always had our tragic heroines: Lana Del Rey, yes, but also Sofia Coppola’s dreamlike girls with tear-streaked cheeks and vacant stares, Fiona Apple wailing into her piano, Winona Ryder looking eternally out of place. Even further back, there’s the doomed glamour of Edie Sedgwick and the aching realizations of Sylvia Plath. While the lineage is long, something has shifted. The sad girl of 2025 doesn’t retreat; she goes out.

And, sadness isn’t just limited to the “manic pixie dream girl.” The romanticization and social shift towards the acceptance of sadness has become communal. A Mitski song plays and everyone gets it— maybe not the lyrics exactly, but the desolation. The disjointedness. The quiet disaster of wanting something, anything, to feel like it matters. And it’s there, for a moment, in passing through your body; in the person beside you whose hand brushes yours just long enough to register.

There’s a specific kind of clarity that comes at 2 a.m., sweat mixing with tears under strobe lights. You lock eyes with a stranger who gets it: sometimes the only way out is through a chorus, through a strobe light, through a tear you don’t bother to wipe away. While the act of crying has become its own genre of content, the sadness isn’t fake.  In a culture that demands wellness and polish, people have just found different ways to frame it.

There’s something acutely candid in that defiance, in the way sadness is no longer something we have to fix before leaving the house. It can be a signal: I feel. I’m here. The act of showing up authentically sad is radical. It's a refusal to shrink, to silence, to sanitize. It’s about staying soft and refusing to numb, allowing emotion to exist without an apology. The “sad girl” in the club doesn’t break down. She shows up and she breaks free. 

Strike out,

Strike St. Louis

Written by: Sophie Miller

Edited by: Emily Bekesh