For many wellness-focused and foodie social media users in the United States, the summer of 2025 was “Sardine Girl Summer” (SGS). Online searches for SGS, sardine-core, or simply “sardines” brings several results about this micro-trend from blogs, TikTok reels, Substacks, and mainstream outlets like CNN, USA Today, and Vogue. Since early May, reports have argued that sardines offer a visual language of micro-luxury amid increasing economic anxiety. We maintain that while these sources pitch SGS as a “recession indicator,” the trend also implies a deeper relationality between commodification, gendered aesthetics, ocean equity, and the climate crisis.
Figure 1. Staud’s Staudines bag. Courtesy of Staud
If the season’s “it girl” was of the sardine variety, who exactly is she? She’s the cute, demure, elegant “hot girl.” She’s the brash, unapologetic, bold connoisseur. Advertisements for Fishwife, a popular women-owned tinned seafood company, claim, “Tinned fish wasn’t always sexy.” And even if she doesn’t want to eat sardines – one reel by the New York Post concludes, “if you thought I was going to end this video by eating one – ew, absolutely not – but happy Sardine Girl Summer to all who celebrate” – she wears reproductions of the fish and its colorful tin on her dress, her bag, her jewelry, her nails.
Figure 2. Sardine Graphic Tee. Courtesy of Anthropologie
In a time of rising inflation, many have argued that micro-trends like SGS consolidate symbols into a “recession-core” aesthetic, or one which romanticizes struggle through its draw on pragmatic and mundane objects or commodities and is stylistically contoured by minimalistic design. When paired with the benefits for beauty, health, and wellness, the SGS trend offers consumers a means of commodified self-actualization, an affordable strategy for building inclusion and belonging online and at home.
SGS as “Recession Indicator”: Complicating the Narrative
We find, however, that the “recession indicator” narrative downplays what is perhaps the simpler explanation: SGS was a strategic, branded aesthetic circulated via social media and commercialized within the fast fashion industry. The season’s marketing was not designed to merely encourage people to eat more sardines, but to buy all the inedible accoutrements to achieve sardine girl status; the clothing, accessories, kitchen supplies, and other home goods became symbols of cultural capital. Martha Stewart, for example, heralded the coming of SGS in an announcement that featured must-have décor, but was remiss to include any recommendations for actual sardines to eat.
Figure 3. Sardine-themed home décor at World Market, Lexington, KY. Courtesy of authors
Figure 4. Sardine-themed products at World Market, Lexington, KY. Courtesy of authors
The Reddit community r/CannedSardines reacted to Stewart’s announcement, with one poster arguing that the trend “seems to undermin[e] the general proletariat nature of the product.” r/CannedSardines and YouTube channels like Canned Fish Files w/ Matthew Carlson have had loyal and growing participant bases for many years, known self-referentially as afishionados, fishy freaks, and “deenz” lovers. Sometimes, these communities are inflected by a more masculine perspective of survivalism-tinged “everyday carry” subculture, which focuses on objects like flashlights, pocketknives, multi-tools, wallets, and yes, sardines, as items to carry in case of an apocalyptic event.
Participants in these communities often reminisce about eating humbler sardines during adolescence or remembering loved ones who enjoyed them. One r/CannedSardines commenter lamented, “It’s over, they gentrified sardines. Now they will be 40 dollars a pack.” In the US, SGS sheds the stigma of poverty and departs from the “stinky” sardine spread on saltine crackers when groceries get too expensive for the month. It also appropriates the diverse local food cultures of fishermen and peasants in Mediterranean communities and elsewhere. It transforms a food pragmatism focused on shelf stability and simple protein to a gendered aesthetic of idealized feminine beauty.
Figure 5. Tinned fish selection at World Market, Lexington, KY. Courtesy of authors
This said, research suggests that people are likely to be eating more fish by 2050 (Garthwaite 2021), so it is useful to think about SGS as a signpost along the way to a future in which tinned fish line the shelves of more American pantries. As a “blue” food source, sardines can be an occasional splurge, with relatively cheap options alongside much more expensive boutique brands. Garthwaite (2021) states:
You don’t see people eating more fish overall as they get richer, but the types of fish they eat may change. At low incomes, people consume more blue foods if they’re affordable. At high incomes, people eat fish if they have some sort of preference for it: health, or sustainability or just taste.
If eating tinned fish is a matter of taste, its bourgeois status was curated on social media. It’s oversimplified to say that sardines became more popular merely because of their affordability, and more likely that the uptick was tied to marketing strategies that capitalized on an already emerging trend. Indeed, SGS grew from the more general “fisherman core,” foodie, and health trends that predated the summer of 2025. Food writer and internet personality chef Alison Roman featured a form of tinned fish escapism in a 2023 article titled, “For when you AREN’T going to Europe this summer.” Roman’s career has included unapologetic advocacy for anchovies and other tinned fish in her recipes and lifestyle, a move that SGS undoubtedly built upon.
Figure 6. An array of specialty tinned fish for sale at Darling Wine Bar, Lexington, KY. Courtesy of authors
During an era of ideological polarization, economic uncertainty, and pending climate collapse, micro-trends like SGS afford simple pleasures and chic micro-luxury by projecting these notions onto commodities. But the commodity fetishism of sardines – or the process by which their inherent value as nonhuman life is obscured – conceals their place in extractive global capitalism, including the social relations and human labor necessary for their industrial production in food and fast fashion industries, and the threatened ecosystems where they live. Here, we aspire to move beyond SGS by contextualizing the micro-trend within these processes.
Commodifying Togetherness
The consumption of nature for commodity production keeps capitalism and nature in intrinsic and perpetual conflict. SGS was a successful micro-trend precisely because its commodification of symbols and aesthetics from the fishing industry obscured its social and ecological realities from consumers. The simplicity and convenience of the trend also meant it was temporary; the hype has already died down. But many communities depend on generational human-fish relationships for cultural, economic, and ecological stability (Probyn 2021a). In such contexts, downturns in fish stocks can have detrimental effects. Populations of small pelagic fish like sardines and anchovies historically experience major fluctuations through industrial fishing’s boom-and-bust cycles that leave social and economic damage in the wake of short-term prosperity (MacCall 2011). The intensification of the climate crisis and deep-sea extractive industries are likely to create more instability in the coming years.
As marine waters warm, sardine species delay their winter migrations and throw predators’ hunting patterns out of balance. Sardines support the world’s largest fisheries (Giron-Nava et al 2021), but they are crashing out in the Pacific due to climate change and overfishing. Sardines are Morocco’s largest export, but Moroccan fisheries are starting to return empty catches. In Portugal, where sardines are core to cultural identity, cuisine, and the national economy, the country has started importing two-thirds of what it eats due to overfishing and mismanagement of fish stocks. Deep-sea mining encroaches on marine migration routes and fisheries (Alam et al 2025), further threatening biodiversity while Indigenous rights and local concerns in coastal and island communities are largely disregarded. The fact that SGS emerged in these contexts is revealing of US consumers’ alienation from production, environmental change, and the wider socio-ecological relationships tied to sardines.
This metabolic rift, or fundamental contradiction between nature and capitalism, is falsely resolved by commodifying human-nature relations and putting them up for sale. Vintage-inspired, kitschy SGS products communicate an idea of togetherness, without actually facilitating relationality. Packed tightly in a tin side-by-side, sardines are pictured together. They offer a comforting narrative in a polarizing society where it’s getting harder to make ends meet. If we’re pressure-packed into metaphorical tins of societal struggle, maybe we can look to each other like the sardines on these shirts and pillows and remember we are in it together, too. But this is a limited, commodified form of togetherness.
Although most SGS products show fishy faces of joy, curiosity, or indifference peering from their tin, you’re more likely to find headless fish when opening a tin of sardines. Often considered “trash fish,” manufacturers remove their heads and guts before packing them and use those parts for bait and fertilizers, or ranch and pulp whole sardines as a meal source for larger and more prized fish (Probyn 2021b). Sardines have even been militarized; during World War II, they were dried and pressed to derive glycerin from their oil, which was converted into nitroglycerin for explosives (Kim 2022). SGS commodifies togetherness for self-actualization and ideal femininity, but it obscures unsavory externalities like malodorousness, supply chain disruption, climate change, and death.
Non-extractive Lessons from Sardines: Solidarity Beyond SGS
Sardines offer their own lesson about togetherness. The annual “sardine run” sees billions of the fish spawning and moving together across the southern tip of Africa in the largest marine migration in nature. Their togetherness can also be observed in the bait balls formed to evade predators. These forms of togetherness are antithetical to the commodified version within SGS because they represent real fishy solidarity.
Figure 7. A large group of fish surrounding a snorkeler. Photo by Diêgo Silva da R Dias on Unsplash
On the surface, SGS offered a consumption-based solidarity via cute t-shirts and artful fish boards. During economic downturn and fraying social cohesion, it may have reminded some of the power in gathering for a simple, lovely meal. But moving beyond the gendered hyper-consumerism of sardine girl summer, what can our connection to these fish, (sea)food systems, and ocean equity look like?
References
Alam, Lubna, Kumara Perumal Pradhoshini, Raphaelle A. Flint, and U. Rashid Sumaila. 2025.
“Deep-sea Mining and its Risks for Social-ecological Systems: Insights from Simulation-based Analyses.” PLoS One. 20(3): e0320888.
Garthwaite, Josie. 2021. “Stanford-led Study Suggests Rising and Shifting Demand for Seafood by 2050. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2021/09/different-seafood-2050.
Giron-Nava, Alfredo, Exequiel Ezcurra, Antoine Brias, Enriqueta Velarde, Ethan Deyle, Andrés M. Cisneros-Montemayor, Stephan B. Munch, George Sugihara, and Octavio Aburto-Oropeza. 2021. “Environmental Variability and Fishing Effects on the Pacific Sardine Fisheries in the Gulf of California.” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 78(5):623–30. doi:10.1139/cjfas-2020-0010.
Kim, Eleana J. 2022. “Militarized Fish.” https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/militarized-fish.
MacCall, Alec D. 2011. “The Sardine-Anchovy Puzzle.” Pp. 47–57 in Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries, edited by J. B. C. Jackson, K. E. Alexander, and E. Sala. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Probyn, Elspeth. 2021a. “Extracting Fish.” Pp. 381–88 in The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography, edited by M. Himley, E. Havice, and G. Valdivia. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
———. 2021b. “Trash Fish, Sand, Sea Snails: Why Little Things Matter.” Griffith Review 71:195–204.
Margaux Crider Robinson is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Kentucky. She is an environmental sociologist currently researching historical and contemporary iterations of populationist discourse, particularly how such narratives inform American political movements and performance on social media.
Aaron Padgett is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kentucky where he holds an affiliate faculty appointment in Appalachian Studies. His work intersects with the sociology of place, environmental justice, and cultural politics of extractivism in Oceania and Appalachia.