Before, the It-girls we admired from a far were confident, untouchable – the Kate Moss and Hailey Biebers of the world. Thanks to Bridgerton 3, the latest it-girl has to be Penelope Featherington.
The room is dark. Just the half-assed hung fairy lights lighting the room. 30 fifteen and sixteen-year-olds squished into someone’s basement. Some are playing spin the bottle. Some are gossiping about their crushes. Some are making toast because they went a bit too hard on the Malibu found under the sink. Empty cans of Strongbow Dark Fruits covering the floor like a carpet. My can is still full to the brim. Tucked away in the corner I’m on my own watching my friends naturally interact with everyone having a blast. Forcing every sip of my dark fruits repeatedly saying to myself: liquid courage, liquid courage, liquid courage.
That’s when I realised I was quite introverted, compared to my friendship group. My friends were natural socialites. Always knowing the right things to say and do the exact right time. Their anecdotes would be retold five times in one night cracking people up through to the next week’s party when they were told all over again. They aspired to look like Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid in the Victoria Secret angel era. They were never stressing about how they looked. They never fiddled with their hair. They were confident. Collected. An it-girl in the making.
Even at that age I was intrigued to know why I was different to my friends – friends I’d known since I was five. Was a nature vs nurture kind of situation? Eventually I found a sufficient title to label myself: a wallflower.
Cambridge dictionary defines a wallflower as a shy person, especially a girl or woman, who is frightened to involve herself in social activities and does not attract much interest or attention. It was a conflicting feeling, mainly because I thought wallflower sounded like such a pretty name it must be a compliment, but the less than positive definition told me otherwise.
My thoughts about being a wallflower were reinforced in the films I was watching. The DUFF. Edge of Seventeen. Perks of being a Wallflower. They shoved down my throat the negatives of being that introverted wallflower kid making it seem as if it was a cannonball chained around your leg, forcing me to believe there was no positives in being who I was.
I was so happy when Bridgerton came along, not only was it the Emma meets Fifty shades mash up I’d been waiting for, but it showed us a range of characters, thriving and comfortably sitting in themselves – introverts included.
Marianna Chiokan, a licensed mental health counsellor based in New York City, believes introvert is just a term curated by society to understand different personalities. “Clinically speaking there is a difference between pop-psychology commonly understood terms and clinically terminology,” she said. “I know the introvert and extrovert terms are very common but it isnt actually a clinical term to describe personality”.
Chiokan believes the reason society has ran with this term is because it is a much simpler way to categorise people. “When you get deeper into psychology there is so much more criteria, it gets much more nitty gritty as we are more complex than that, its very black and white like good or bad,” she said. “The media in particular the sensationalism we see has been seen as something that gets a lot of clicks and attention and I think we saw that being reflected in very loud behaviour in tv and film”.
I’ll never forget watching Wild child as a kid. Watching Poppy jump into the sea holder her step-mother’s clothes as all her friends applauded made me think, as a young impressionable girl, I had to act that outrageously and out-there to be considered attractive or even valued.
The complexity of the characters in Bridgerton however show a change – especially for the female characters. Watching season one of Bridgerton back in 2020 I was naturally drawn to Penelope Featherington. Even more so when her alter-ego, Lady Whistledown, the eternally formidable and candid writer and gossip, was revealed. We watched Penelope loiter around the balls, as a wallflower does, taking mental notes of gossip to use for her own gain. Even though her choices may have gone against her (writing a hate letter about Colin was not a good move) she still was able to use her introverted nature, something societally seen as undesirable, to her own advantage.
Even now watching the release of Bridgerton 3, you see Penelope isn’t just this shy woman lost in a crowd amongst her ostentatious and often vapid sisters and mother but a layered and complex character who couldn’t be simply labelled one thing.
In my opinion, I don’t think many of us are entertained by the it-girls we followed so intently in the noughties and 2010s. We’ve seen the singular image put out by the likes of Torrance Shipman and the countless other it-girls we’ve seen grace our screens over and over we wanted something new.
“I am glad to see there is a little bit more levelling out to demonstrate norms that confidence is not loud, confidence does not necessarily have to look like it has historically been portrayed in television and in the media,” says Chiokan. “Whether you call it introverts or any other label – we get to see the other side of the spectrum which is really good and really healthy”.
“Just because you’re not loud or you don’t have a million friends doesn’t mean there is no value or thought, actually often there is a lot more of those qualities within an introvert,” says Chiokan sitting in her NYC office. “People like introverts tend to take their time to reflect to be with themselves to think things through – there’s a lot of depth there that shows up in all different kinds of relationships in positive ways”.
Seeing characters like Penelope who aren’t all together makes me fall in love with Bridgerton that much. They aren’t perfect, but they aren’t trying to be. I want to see more depth like what Chiokan is talking about. I think we’ve earnt it
Thanks to the much awaited release of Bridgerton 3, it is officially the season of the wallflower.
Expert insight: Marianna Chiokan
Marianna Chiokan is a licensed mental health counsellor based in New York City. Chiokan has worked in inpatient psychiatric hospitals where she developed a deep appreciation and awareness for individuals with severe and persistent mental illness.
