Every summer needs its phrase, and “Kinda chic to” was 2026’s. The pale yellow font, mirror selfie, or artfully lit matcha with some observation dressed up as a confession has taken over Instagram with the same speed as “brat” in 2024 and “This and” last year. It’s kinda chic to repeat outfits. Kinda chic to always have a trip booked. Kinda chic to be overdressed. Google Trends shows searches up 5000 percent, and the hashtag has cracked 97,000 posts. The appeal is its infinite elasticity, since the word “chic” has been diluted to the point of meaning almost nothing, which is precisely why it can be stapled to almost anything.

Celebrities caught on fast. Drew Barrymore declared it “kinda chic to be in your 50s.” Reese Witherspoon used it to cheer on Laura Dern. Ashley Graham applied it to cellulite and a Victoria’s Secret runway. But the real tell that a trend has fully calcified is when brands show up — and they showed up almost instantly. Boots posted that it was “kinda chic to reapply your SPF.” Aldi used it to sell a foldable sock hanger. Virgin Atlantic tied it to booking a flight with no vacation days left. That’s the same arc last year’s “This and” template followed. It started with an organic phrase, followed by celebrity adoption, corporate co-option, exhaustion, death, usually inside a single season. Social media consultant Bella Younger calls what’s left “a long hot summer of copy, paste,” and fashion editor Brenda Weischer is blunter still, dismissing it outright as “template slop.”

But for this year’s trend, there’s a little irony baked in. Plus-size influencer and small-business consultant Char has claimed to be the creator of the trend and recently posted a lengthy takedown of the entire trend, framing it as straightforward intellectual property theft rather than harmless internet culture. “That kinda chic idea was someone’s hard work,” she wrote, describing watching her viral post get “copied, tweaked, made their own” by a wave of imitators. “When that happens to a product, we’re outraged. And rightly so. But when that happens to an idea, it’s called a ‘trend.’ Soz, but I don’t buy it.” She insists that people stop playing along with “copycat culture” and post “the real version of YOU rather than ‘your take’ on someone else.”

It might have been a valid take if Char’s own feed wasn’t built almost entirely from the same borrowed-format playbook she’s condemning. Many of her posts read like a greatest hits of viral templates other people originated first, repackaged with her own branding, the exact “tweaked, made their own” move she’s accusing everyone else of. And perhaps the most humorous part is that when people are commenting on her post about the “copy paste” trend, it seems she has a ManyChat automation set up that fires off scripted DMs to commenters. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily. After all, it’s a fairly standard influencer-marketing funnel. But when you’re writing a manifesto about moral responsibility and copycat culture, perhaps turn off the automated outreach for a week or two.

But that’s what makes this conversation so interesting. Nobody actually owns a format built from a font choice and a sentence structure, no matter how personally it started or how viral it went. That’s exactly why platforms reward it. The algorithm doesn’t care who invented “kinda chic,” it cares that the format performs, and performance is what keeps everyone from the originators and copycats to Aldi’s social media team doing the same thing until it dies. Char isn’t wrong that the internet is drowning in “samey soup.” She’s just also, whether she’d admit it or not, part of what’s stirring the pot.