Girlhood, Memes And Melodrama: Inside Pop Culture’s Wild Summer 2025

This was the summer Team Conrad finally won. The summer that proved pop culture belongs to the girls and the gays, and everyone else is just footing the WiFi bill. Every Instagram reel caption read like Belly’s diary, every Spotify playlist bled like a Swift-coded heartbreak, and every group chat turned into a Conrad-versus-Jeremiah battleground like it was the next election.

But that was just the opening act. Bollywood gave us Saiyaara, a song equal parts rom-com fantasy and cringe-fest that somehow scored everything from memes to late-night Uber rides. Superman came back—not just to save Metropolis, but to convince us punk rock wasn’t dead. Rom-coms, long declared extinct, rose again in full glossy, spray-tanned glory. Weddings became blockbusters. Denim became bloodsport. And Coldplay? They accidentally turned an HR scandal into stadium entertainment.

Summer 2025 wasn’t tidy or tasteful, it was a messy dose of drama, which is exactly why we’ll remember it.

1. The Summer I Turned Pretty Finale Took Over the Internet

Jenny Han did what Marvel couldn’t: dominate the cultural timeline. The finale of The Summer I Turned Pretty sparked endless reels, X threads, and viral posts. Team Conrad stans finally got their redemption arc, Team Jeremiah fans uploaded twenty-minute YouTube essays about how he escaped Belly, and Swifties got three new fan edits per day scored to every album possible. The show didn't just trend, it became the blueprint of girlhood on the internet, and let's not forget we have a movie coming up.

2. Taylor Swift Got Engaged—and Dropped Another Album

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)

After years of decoding Easter egg hunts hidden in cardigans, mirrors, and bread crumbs, Swifties finally got the headline they’d been manifesting: Miss Swift is engaged, to none other than the guy from the Chiefs, Travis Kelce. The internet combusted, half-crying over their parasocial Maid of Honour status, half-calculating how many engagement rings would appear in future lyrics. And before the confetti even settled, she announced another album. Taylor doesn’t rest; she regenerates—pop culture’s own Marvel franchise. Only she doesn’t need a multiverse; she is the multiverse.

3. Big Screen, Bigger Drama

Superman swooped back into theatres, and people actually cared again. Elsewhere, things weren’t so heroic. Mission: Impossible and Jurassic World stumbled, Marvel coughed out two films no one remembered, and fandoms finally started whispering the F-word: fatigue.

The real winner? KPop Demon Hunters, a Netflix release that turned into a global phenomenon, spawning dance trends, Billboard domination, and fanfic detailed enough to deserve its own spinoff. Meanwhile, Bollywood’s Saiyaara went full spectacle, and fans were literally tearing shirts in theatres. Cinema may be struggling, but chaos is thriving.

4. Nostalgia Is Still the Cheat Code

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anne Hathaway (@annehathaway)

Hollywood’s Plan A, B, and C remains… nostalgia. Lilo & Stitch got its live-action treatment, Freaky Friday staged a comeback, Happy Gilmore 2 landed on Netflix, and The Devil Wears Prada 2 began filming in New York. Everyone groaned, complained, and then everyone streamed them anyway. As Miranda Priestly would say: groundbreaking.

5. Coldplay’s HR Scandal Went Stadium-Sized

Most HR drama dies in a Slack channel. Not when Coldplay’s involved. At one of their stadium shows this summer, the jumbotron allegedly outed an office affair. Imagine 50,000 fans singing Fix You while Karen from Finance gets soft-launched as the other woman. Suddenly, every office worker was side-eyeing their HR policies, and “corporate Coldplay” became a genre in itself. Truly, the messiest encore of the season.

6. BTS Reunion: The Internet’s Loudest Group Chat

The boys' reunion wasn’t just about music; fan cams flooded every timeline, hashtags trended in 17 languages, and economists briefly wondered if ARMY could stabilise the yen. For a generation raised on purple hearts and fancalls, this was their therapy session, and a global holiday rolled into one. The reunion made it feel like 2016 again.

7. Kendrick Lamar at the NFL: A Halftime Show With Teeth

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by NFL (@nfl)

Just when you thought the NFL had settled into a safe rhythm of legacy acts and family-friendly choreography, Kendrick Lamar torched the script. His halftime show wasn’t just a performance—it was a political statement wrapped in Pulitzer-level bars. Between the visuals, the dancers, and the raw lyricism, Kendrick reminded us that football might be America’s game, but hip-hop is its conscience. Forget touchdowns—the only replay anyone cared about was Kendrick turning a halftime slot into a cultural referendum.

8. Small Screen Supremacy

via GIPHY

Squid Game wrapped its long-awaited second season, leaving viewers both traumatised and hungry for spin-offs. K-drama fans, meanwhile, found their new cult obsession in When Life Gives You Tangerines, a melancholy slice-of-life about love, grief, and the burden of being the eldest daughter. On the Western side, And Just Like That finally signed off, proving Carrie Bradshaw will always have one last monologue left in her.

9. Performative Males, Exposed

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ELLE India (@elleindia)

This was the summer of the “performative male”—men who over-explained, over-podcasted, and under-delivered. The internet stitched them to death, think-pieces were written, and group chats dissected their Laufey playlists and dating red flags. Somewhere between Kendall Roy wannabes and finance bros in vintage band tees, the internet decided: maybe silence is the new sexy. 

10. Memes Were the Real Economy

Forget Wall Street—this summer was powered by the Jet2holidays meme. A random British airline slogan became the caption for everything, from bad hangovers to existential dread. Cardi B turned courtroom appearances into viral lookbooks, and Kendrick Lamar’s halftime set became an instant meme template.

Labubu, the viral bunny from Dubai cafés, took over every Gen Z feed. Capitalism has never looked cuter.

11. The Denim Wars

Fashion’s fiercest battlefield was denim. Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign flopped so hard it became a meme. Levi’s got Beyoncé to yeehaw their brand back into relevance, Addison Rae lent her TikTok gloss to Lucky Brand, but Gap’s Better in Denim campaign with K-pop group Katseye crushed everyone else. With Robbie Blue’s choreography, Zac Posen’s styling, and Kelis’ Milkshake blasting, it wasn’t an ad—it was an event.

12. Bollywood’s Saiyaara Summer

No song defined summer like Saiyaara. Was it genius? Was it cringe? Honestly, both. The track made audiences scream in theatres, DJs couldn’t stop spinning it, and Instagram reels spread it like wildfire. Whether you loved it or hated it, you were still humming it under your breath. The verdict? Bollywood melodrama remains undefeated.

13. Labubu Takeover

If there was one creature that quietly hijacked 2025, it was Labubu. The bug-eyed went from niche Pop Mart collectible to splashed across everywhere, sold out in every drop, and plastered on everything from matcha lattes to phone cases. Gen Z crowned it their chaotic emotional support animal, a mix of cute and creepy that perfectly mirrored the internet’s collective mood. Even celebrities couldn’t resist soft-launching plushies in perfectly curated Instagram carousels.

Also, read:

Taylor Swift Is Shaping Girlhood For Legions Of Girls And Women And That’s Worth Celebrating

The Best Looks From Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour

The Lore Behind Taylor Swift’s 'August' Is For The Girls Who Almost Had It All