What “Demure” Means Now

What is demure? My late grandmother’s cardigans and knee-length skirts were demure. Young, well-brought-up Victorian ladies were supposed to be demure. To be demure is to be reserved, modest and shy. It’s a word you’re more likely to hear in a period drama than everyday conversation.

Now you hear it a lot on TikTok too. “Demure” is the platform’s new obsession, and it’s thanks to Jools Lebron. Earlier this month, she posted a video about her low-key makeup, saying: “See how I come to work? Very demure.” A video from later that day, about “how to be demure at work,” went viral and now has more than five million views. “The way I came to the interview is the way I go to the job,” she explains. “A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.” Another catchphrase—“very demure, very mindful”—is now everywhere, including, bizarrely, in an Instagram post by New York City’s sanitation department.

Since then, Lebron has really leaned in to “demurity,” as she once referred to it. She’s told us how to be demure when you order your food and when you get your nails done; “How to board the plane in a demure and respectful way”; “How to pick up your ID you left at the gay bar in a very demure way”; “How to keep your hair at a demure length”; “How to keep your dental care demure through mental health struggles.”

What does this all boil down to? For Lebron, “demure” is often twinned with “mindful,” or “cutesy,” or “sweetsy.” It emphasizes the slight coyness that lurks in the original sense of demure: doing a lot by not doing too much. She also laces the word with a heavy amount of irony, like saying she doesn’t drink or party, then cutting away to footage of her rambling through a hotel, drunkenly slurring “very demure.”

Lebron is trans, and in one video situated her demure ideal in that lineage: “There has been so many demure divas who have come before me,” she said, citing Venus Xtravaganza, a star of the drag documentary Paris Is Burning. This makes sense: a lot of LGBTQ culture, such as gay men dressing as macho archetypes like sailors or soldiers, is about appropriating things that might seem opposed to it. Being a “demure diva”—seemingly a contradiction in terms—has that same spirit of sly transgression.

But “demure” has also hit a chord in the wider online world too. Partly, it’s just ended up on the seesaw of social media trends, which pivot from one aesthetic to its opposite then back again: “clean girl”, then “Brat”, then “demure.” It also chimes with how Gen Zs are somewhat of a small-c conservative generation, who go out less, drink less and have less sex than their elders.

Which is not to say they’ve adopted the habits of 19^th-century maidens, but they are, genuinely, a bit demure. Either that, or they hijack conservative aesthetics for a look, like how the gothic crosses of traditional Catholicism recently had a TikTok moment. And “demure” as Lebron uses it —an ironic, elastic word that can mean everything and nothing at once—covers all the bases. You can be demure, and you can be a diva too.

This story originally appeared in British GQ.