Tomato Girl Summer—TikTok Is Fuelling Mediterranean Travel Obsessions

Type “Tomato Girl Summer” into TikTok and you’ll find a string of aesthetically pleasing shots of a certain type of travel lifestyle taking place right now—it involves farmers’ markets, slow cooking in rustic kitchens, home-grown fruit and vegetables. Ideally, it has the Mediterranean as a backdrop but it can take place anywhere in the world—it just channels the ideals of this type of travel.

If you haven’t seen it, maybe you’re not part of this population cohort, one that uses TikTok. However, it’s big news right now, fuelling travel obsessions. Vogue just wrote about it (“Before There Was Tomato Girl, There Were Tomatoes on the Runways”) defining it as “Mediterranean-vacation-ready” looks and Slate defined what it takes to be a tomato girl, namely that it can’t be exactly defined. More that it’s someone living their best tomato-girl life, “posting dreamy vacation snaps from the Amalfi coast, wearing lots of linen, and drinking endless Aperol spritzes”.

There are lots of videos of tomato girls currently on TikTok and beyond, with the trend taking hold in New York and featuring on Good Morning America. Tomato girl doesn’t have to actually be wearing a red dress but it helps the aesthetic. Recent summer snaps of JLo and Billie Eilish are the inspiration for many tomato girls. Tomato girls don’t have to be somewhere synonymous with fresh tomatoes—think the French Riviera or the Greek or Spanish islands—but they just have to be somewhere where they can post themselves lounging, cooking, drinking cocktails and looking great. The trend has even added Cucumber Girls into the mix.

It’s not a new trend; it’s just been given a new name for a younger generation. It is harmonious with the idea of slow travel, a certain type of Provençal lifestyle—the kind where everyone has the time to grow their own vegetables and still get dressed up for lunch and dinner to show off their chilled rosé wine by an (immaculate-looking) pool. As Slate says, it’s “a way of performing a sort of effortless-looking elegance without being a member of the leisure class. In short, it’s a lovely illusion.”

This is a trend that went viral when Instagram began, with the up-and-coming influencers of the early twenty-tens in Byron Bay, reviewed in Vanity Fair in 2019—Instagrammers that sell a version of surfing, entrepreneurial, youthful moms, hanging out together and making a living, selling perfect lifestyles, in one of the most picturesque parts of Australia.

TikTok is allowing people to take the out-of-office vibe, this travel ideal, and repackage it with videos, in memes, with teens or twenty-somethings re-selling it for their own demographic. And why not? Whilst it still might be selling an unattainable ideal—it’s a hard lifestyle to maintain financially, not to mention the effort involved in always looking so Provençal-travel-ready, plus it’s really hard work to actually grow all your own food—it is a trend that looks to a simpler life, a slower and a more fulfilling way to spend your time. Pretty much your average holiday ideal then.