Against ‘toddlercore’

New Yorkers have always waited in line for culture-defining memories and trinkets — admissions to nightclubs, fashion scores from sample sales, Sex and the City cupcakes, or an “I Voted” sticker for the #resistance. But the new lines lengthening and proliferating across the Big Apple are confoundingly lackluster, due both to the fashion of the people waiting in them and to the grotesque, sugar-bomb goodies Gen Z is desperate to score.

The mostly women queuing obediently around Manhattan for cult hits like Soft Swerve and HeyTea are displaying sartorial choices as sweet, shapeless, frothy and generic as the products they’re waiting to consume. Soft Swerve , for the uninitiated, is a New York-based chain serving kiddie-colored soft-serve ice cream in Asian flavors, topped with whimsical, nostalgic items such as mochi or Fruity Pebbles. HeyTea is a blended-tea-drink chain launched in China that brands itself as distinctive by using real fruits and juices instead of powders. And while millennial restaurateur David Chang and his pastry chef Christina Tosi deserve credit for the soft-serve revival in the aughts — their “cereal milk” flavor tapped into millennial nostalgia for adult-free Saturday mornings bingeing cartoons — at least Team Chang did so with a healthy dose of kitsch and camp to add some acid. Gen Z goes the same route with earnest sensitivity. The trend, it seems, is self-infantilization.

The “West Village girl” uniform on display in these lines is amorphous, unisex and pre-sexual: white tank-top and figure-obscuring, light blue, baggy denim. Each young woman wears exactly the same thing as her friends, and as everyone around her. This look’s stylistic predecessor, “mom jeans,” wasn’t very sexy, but it was more grown-up, accommodating a postpartum midsection and tapering down the leg in a last-ditch nod to the feminine silhouette. The new West Village cozy-chic barrel cut is so voluminous and unstructured below the knee, it resembles a pair of surplus-store jogging pants.

The Zoomer mood board deserves the label “self-infantilization chic,” or “toddlercore.” The generation is defined by historically high sugar consumption, the choice of lifestyle over fashion, aversion to sex and vice, diligent consumption of media, and dutiful consumerism. At the center of the board should sit a single analogue hack many Zoomers have probably never heard of — the sugar tit.

The sugar tit was a staple in the South for poorer families, especially during the Great Depression, and is essentially a makeshift pacifier. To make one, mothers whipped softened butter and sugar into a creamy emulsion, then wrapped it in cheesecloth for babies to suck as they explored the world, wearing a flour sack fashioned into a onesie. Thus ensconced in a cocoon and suckling on mommy’s teat, they could enjoy a carefree existence while mainlining sweet cream.

Ejection from this paradise is the existential gripe of the character Rue, the lead in HBO’s Gen Z-defining television series Euphoria . The show identifies the basic fact of eviction from the womb as the origin of Rue’s outsized anxiety and ensuing opioid addiction. Anesthetizing drugs offer Rue the closest simulation she can achieve to this amniotic sanctuary, until her tragic almost-reunion with mommy in the finale.

A cozy, safe place in an IG-worthy line makes the same promise as Rue’s drug addiction: a second-best return to the creature comforts of early childhood, when a diet of already-masticated foods is spoon-fed for easy digestion and quick endorphins, and while the conflict between baby and mommy, self and object, male and female linger on the horizon.

Soft Swerve offers a checklist of exotic flavors — ube, saffron, halva — but the essence of the pleasure is mouth feel and texture, or lack thereof. These chilled, aerated puddings are a toddler’s fever dream. Like the sugar tit, they combine ice cream and baby food, and even the self-definition of a deliberate scoop isn’t required. A concoction that is neither liquid nor solid splooges out from a teat-like apparatus to the queuing masses.

In late May, the soft-serve lines were eclipsed by the grand opening of a HeyTea Tea Bar on the Upper East Side. The city already had more than a dozen locations of the Chinese chain, the heir to the boba craze, but the UES outlet is the first in New York to offer sit-down service. Drinks such as the Coconut Mango Boom, Supreme Brown Sugar Bobo Milk Tea, and King Jasmine Guava start at approximately 400 calories. The signature “Cloud” line is topped with a “cheese cloud,” a “pillowy foam” of condensed milk, cheese, and cream — in other words, a sugar tit. And the chain’s marketing copy is correspondingly banal and unthreatening. The IG feed for its United States locations promises that the product “ n ever gets old … milk aroma. Easy on the palate, easy to love… .” Just what the toddlers ordered.

“These chilled, aerated puddings are a toddler’s fever dream.”

Gen Z’s culinary…