Why Millennials Fetishize Autumn

Just in time for the Pumpkin Spice Latte!!!

Aug 23, 2024

My vibes from now until Thanksgiving, which, as everyone knows, is just practice Christmas

It’s August, the month ruled by Taylor Swift, the penultimate month in the season ruled by Lana Del Rey. But it seems like most of the other young women I know are ready for summer to be over. In fact, they’ve been ready for summer to be over since it started.

My YouTube subscription box is clogged with Autumn decorating vlogs, fall fashion forecasts, celebrations of the first cool morning heralding the return of autumn. The much-maligned talisman of our collective obsession with autumn, the Pumpkin Spice Latte, just came back yesterday. I got roughly 4 hysterical push notifications from the Starbucks app about it. Approximately 400% of all the content on Pinterest features autumn leaves. Right now, when I search for “fall outfits” on Pinterest, the app crashes, which leads me to believe millions of people are doing the same thing. The TV show Gilmore Girls, which heavily features cozy-New-England-fall vibes, is one of Netflix’s most popular titles even though it’s been off the air for seventeen years. Viewership spikes in the fall and winter, too. One of my closest friends has been posting Halloween memes on her Instagram stories since June.

We are collectively glamorizing autumn with startling intensity. Do you ever see anyone stanning as hard for spring? Me either.

I know there are plenty of millennials and Gen-Z who love summer—and I’ve even become one of them, since I moved to the Pacific Northwest. The darkness of the winters here, as a lifelong California girl, make me terribly depressed. But I’m sure you’ve noticed the burnt-orange-and-cinnamon collective psychosis we enter as soon as mid-August rolls around. I want to understand why we glamorize and fetishize autumn this way. And I actually think it’s not that complicated.

Autumn, Glamour, and Nostalgia

There’s an Anne Carson quote I think about roughly ten times a day: “Whoever desires what is not gone? No one.” There can be no desire without absence, whether it’s just perceived or really true.

When you fall in love, you don’t so much fall in love with the person as you do with the Beloved-shaped hole that you become aware of as soon as they leave your bed to go to work. While they’re away, you imagine them as even more beautiful and interesting than they really are. And you can’t do that if they’re still in the apartment fussing over a lost computer dongle or gargling mouthwash a little too loudly.

So it is with our Fantasy Selves–with those apparitions of who we could be someday. We are thrilled by the possibility that we, too, could be more stylish or competent or charismatic. And it appeals to us precisely because it’s new, unfamiliar, and just a little out of reach.

We’re obsessed with autumn because it’s vanishing.

We glamorize it because in many parts of the country, it no longer exists. I remember being little and seeing frost on the tips of the crab grass on early October mornings. I remember being seven, and needing my beloved black velour sweater (complete with a red velvet bow on the neckline and a velvet teddy bear on the chest! You bitches could never!) by September. Now, Southern California is a smoke-choked furnace through November at least, and it’s still eighty degrees on Christmas. I saw autumn go away in my hometown in my own lifetime.

And so yeah, we like autumn because its aesthetic hallmarks are beautiful and broadly appealing:

burgundy and deep forest green look good on everyone, while the redheads truly have the fall-foliage colors on lock
Fall fashion offers, in my view, the lowest difficulty setting of any season to look stylish easily. The back-to-school “dark academia” prep style is flattering and versatile, largely appropriate for a variety of social contexts. Put any woman in knee high boots, sheer black or brown stockings, a wool miniskirt and a cream ribbed turtleneck and she will look great. Same goes for whimsigoth, Lorelai-Gilmore-core, and so on. I have been dining out on hunter green cable knit sweaters since I was 19 years old, and I have no intention of stopping. This is the season where we can all pretend to be living in 1980s Ralph Lauren ads. Catch me at the stables smoking Marlboros in my jodhpurs just like Betty Draper!
Ralph Lauren ads and spreads of yore
Also, not for nothing, fall’s styles traditionally offer more modest cuts and silhouettes, which makes them more accessible for women who dress modestly for religious or cultural reasons. It’s just a sartorial season that’s friendly to basically everyone–without the heinous functionality of winter outerwear.
Fall lipsticks are god tier. Once again, the beauty of a berry, mauve, or rich chocolate brown? It just looks elegant.
Fall has superior produce. Yeah, I said it. Name a more versatile fruit than the humble apple. You can’t, because God didn’t make one.
Pumpkins and various gourds are fun. Martha Stewart always has delightful explainers about all the different colors and heirloom varieties.
If you loved school and found summers lonely, like I did, then September feels more like the New Year than January. Plus, type-A adjacents like me love back-to-school shopping! I love planners, stationery, and fancy pens! I love pencil cases! And folders! And the little rulers you snap into your three-ring-binder! Give me all of it!

Everyone I know has been “mentally here” since June 15 except my friend Danielle who loves summer. All I can think about when I see this many leaves is slipping and falling. I have a bum knee, you guys. I can’t partake in Christian Girl Autumn like this.

Okay so all of that aside, yes, autumn is objectively a beautiful time. But I wager that we would not be so obsessed with it if it were actually a healthy, robust season lasting more than a few short weeks. If it came on time, with the equinox, like it’s supposed to, and lingered until that periwinkle blue morning in early December when the air hurts to inhale.

If autumn were not imperiled by a steadily warming world, we would not glamorize it half as much as we do. Which is what nostalgia is, broadly speaking: desire that looks backwards at the past. Now listen here, honey, the past is unpredictable, and always changing in its kaleidoscopic way. But one thing’s for certain: you can’t bring it back.

I know this red is too bright for ‘autumn’ but does this not give you autumn vibes! Look at Burt’s outfit! Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster, 1946.

And yet we try. We wear the burgundy sweaters of autumn in ferociously air conditioned offices, peeling them off as soon as we walk back out to the 90 degree afternoon. We eat and drink the spices of autumn while choking on wildfire smoke, which tauntingly tints the sun pumpkin-orange. We go to Target and buy new trinkets and plaid pillow shams, all suspiciously cheap and plastic-heavy, to announce the new season in our homes. Autumn is a goddess we worship even as the rhythms of our culture keep her away from us, and threaten to destroy her entirely.

Perhaps, we reason, if we invoke her, if we pay tribute, if we give offerings of cinnamon and cornucopias and witch tea towels and cognac leather boots, we can get her to come back.

But those aren’t the right offerings to make. You know it, I know it.

This is about That: Why It Hurts So Much That Autumn Is Vanishing

Because yes, autumn is the season of the harvest, a season of plenty. And that harmonizes with the aims of out-of-control fossil-fuel capitalism1, which is hungry for more expansion, more growth, more fruit.

Autumn is also the beginning of a contraction. A slowing down. Shorter days. The light is fading, bit by bit. The energy and power and freedom of the spring and summer, they aren’t meant to be perennial. The growing season ends.

For a seed to give birth to life, first it must die.

And in the Anthropocene, in our industrialist-capitalist-stock-options-microplastics-growth-mindset age, we routinely deny this. Sure, we have recessions (Jerome Powell, how is you doin, baby?). But we don’t ever truly slow down as a culture. Everyone and everything is hurtling towards Q4.

And so there’s a sense in which our collective obsession with autumn isn’t just about a shortening or vanishing season thanks to climate change. It’s also about the psychic damage that occurs from a culture that can’t, won’t, shan’t slow down and choose intentional rest and quietude.

Nope, we’ve gotta keep growing profit margins and productivity, no matter what that means for the polar bears or the rare wildflowers of Montana or the children in suffering from new and odd forms of asthma or the garment workers in Bangladesh paid pennies an hour so we can wear the latest fall fashions that are the most popular on TikTok. In a hilariously meta twist, the same day as the Pumpkin Spice Latte returned, the new CEO of Starbucks caught flack for planning to “supercommute” via private jet from Newport Beach to Seattle. Carbon emissions are the reason why the autumnal season is so imperiled! But at least we’ll always have coffee drinks that taste like Bath and Bodyworks candles!2

As within, so without. We haven’t just lost the cooling temperatures of September or the fiery colors of fall foliage. We’ve lost the ability to follow and trust our own instincts to slow down, to sleep in, to reflect. Because things are too precarious for most of us to go part-time at work or actually take those vacation days or stay home to be with our little ones, right?

So when I talk about all this I just want to make clear that I’m not blaming or shaming you for not being able to slow down. Swimming against the collective tide is hard unless you have a certain level of financial security or–imagine!–community or collective care.

Recently I went part time at work for a temporary period because I was so exhausted I couldn’t get out of bed. I’ve also had extremely difficult family circumstances that contributed to my tiredness. The only reason I could afford to do that was that I have some savings, thank God. It feels so strange to have Fridays back, and the gratitude I feel for it is so humbling, so intense, that it makes me cry.

I want everyone to have their Fridays back, as it were. To be able to slow down and stop producing so much, because that’s the only way we will get autumn to return for real–though she will never be the same.

Spring and Fall

In college I took several classes from a professor named Father Rynes (as if it wasn’t manifestly obvious, I was educated by Jesuits). Father Rynes hailed from Nebraska, and looked like Abraham Lincoln, had Honest Abe lived into his seventies. Tall and rail-thin and always dressed in a sport coat and tie, Fr Rynes spoke in a booming baritone. His voice tumbled and crested and whispered and rumbled like a mighty river. His personal Bible was in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, and when he read from it in The Bible As Literature class, he would simply translate it into English as he went.

Fr Rynes could be prickly. He also lavished me with kindness in the depths of the worst depression I’ve ever experienced. He believed in me when I couldn’t believe in myself, and even though he is no longer with us, his love has never left me.

He is why I’m still writing.

One day in Introduction To Poetry class, he recited one of his favorite poems from memory. I still remember the timbre of his voice, following the sprung verse, and the ancient Anglo-Saxon rhythm of it cut me to the quick. In honor of him, I’ll share it with you, though my voice is nothing special compared to his.

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