With additional reporting by Margot Rosenblatt
I first heard the words “fit-check” from my daughter, Margot.
“Basically this guy came up and was, like, ‘fit-check!’” she told us, over a family dinner. The expression sounded benign, maybe something from an exercise app. I asked her what, exactly, she meant.
In its most traditional, and to Margot, most acceptable form, a kid who admires a peer’s outfit — the “fit” — asks them for a “fit-check.” It’s a compliment, as in, “I like your pants, where’d you get them?”
But, Margot, 13, had experienced a weirder version of the trend. During lunch, the most important part of her school day, a boy interrupted her conversation with friends to present a fit-check of himself, an intrusive Instagram Reel come to life.
@winston69_ purple ahhh background 🧏🏽♂️#fyp #fitcheck #ootd #utah #jnco #90s #jncojeans #fashion #jncobaby
♬ Doo Wop (That Thing) - Lauryn Hill
“He explained where his whole outfit came from,” Margot said: hoodie, shirt, pants, shoes.
Trends like this tend to pass me by; I’m 54, and have long cultivated a cranky disdain for social media. That feeling has driven my wife and I to officially ban our kids from using most platforms. Margot does have a smartphone, but her screen time is monitored and limited, a policy she finds intrusive and oppressive.
Still, a certain exposure is inescapable. The small anecdotes from my children’s lives — seeing and hearing the world through their eyes and ears — are a dependable joy of parenthood. Even without allowing her to be on social media, that worldview too often comes filtered through the intrusive lens of social media, a world which I am largely ignorant of, mostly by choice.
After hearing her lunch tale, I wanted to understand why, exactly, someone would interrupt a conversation with a performative fit-check. And I thought the subject might tell me something more — something about the state of the modern San Francisco middle schooler.
Margot wasn’t thrilled when I told her I had some follow-up questions, possibly to turn into an article.
“Actually?” she replied.
“Yes,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Margot said, in a tone that indicated that everything, in fact, was wrong with it. “It’s just kind of weird.”
Of course, Margot is at an age when many things I do are weird, off-putting, or embarrassing.
Last month, the weekend before school started, she and I traveled to San Diego for a soccer tournament. As we approached the field for her team’s second match, I asked for a hug. Nothing big or overly expressive or emotional, just a brief good luck, I’m proud of you, kick-some-ass show of support.
Margot shot me a scornful look, as if I’d suggested I might play in the game with her. She slung her arm around my shoulder half-heartedly and ran off to join her team.
“They say they come around,” said a stranger standing nearby, a dad, obviously, who witnessed the exchange.
He told me how, as he drove his daughter to a recent soccer practice, she demanded to be let out far enough from the field that her teammates wouldn’t see them together.
“I was like, are you fucking kidding me!” he said, his language taking me by surprise. “I mean, how do they think she got there? Like, what, a spaceship dropped her off?”
I imagined his daughter suffering the diatribe. If Margot had that guy as her dad for even a day, I thought, it might close some of the distance that’s grown up between us as she has.
Still, I empathize with his feeling of estrangement; it’s tough when it seems like your role has been reduced from parent to unpaid chauffeur. Earlier this summer, on vacation, I confiscated Margot’s phone as a punishment and was surprised by how quickly she let go of the attachment, quickly becoming more engaged in the physical world. It reminded me of my own childhood without smartphones, or the internet, and the serendipity of an unsearchable world.
But Margot’s middle school is on the other side of the city from home, and further from work. She takes city buses. A phone makes it easier for her to get around, keep in touch, and participate in the world. And if the device is an inevitable part of being a teenager, so is, to some degree, social media.
Since Margot wasn’t interested in an in-depth conversation about how social media was affecting her social life, I asked her if I could interview her friends about their experiences with fit-checks.
“No way!” she said, in a raised voice approaching anger. “That is so embarrassing. I'm sorry, that is where I draw the line.”
Not only did she draw the line, she skillfully planted a new seed of doubt about the story’s viability.
“I don't think it’s going to be a good story idea in the first place, to be honest,” she added. “It’s already, like, pretty dated.”
Dated. Margot is all too aware of my own sensitivity about growing old: Whether it’s on the tennis court or soccer field, or in conversation, I’m constantly recalibrating my game to compensate for a new and creeping slowness. Margot and her little brother have feasted on the vulnerability, treating me like an old wrist watch whose face gets tapped to see if its second hand is still working.
Still, I wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip away. My editor suggested I ask Margot to interview her own friends, and get credit as a co-reporter. This, finally, cracked my daughter’s shell — just a little.
It wasn’t without limitations or hitches. Her first interview, recorded as an audio file on iMessage, disappeared before either of us could transcribe it. But finally, taking old-fashioned notes (kind of, because they were typed on her phone), she got her friend Suki on-record.
Earlier that same day, Suki had witnessed a friend getting fit-checked — as in, someone walked up and asked who she was wearing. In response, Suki’s friend revealed that her top was from Brandy Melville, her pants from Amazon, and she wore Adidas shoes.
“I have overheard quite a few recently,” Suki told Margot. Fit-checks can be a good way to “kind of show off an outfit and tell people where the clothes are from,” she added. She finds them funny, but also annoying, because they’re so common.
Teenagers have always cared a lot about how they look, and followed fads in what they wear. But fit-checks are something new: a product of social media that encourages both conformity and over-spending, a demand to keep up with the Joneses at ever-younger ages. As a parent, I find the attention on not just appearance, but on brands, profoundly disturbing.
My daughter, of course, is less concerned; she just finds fit-checks “stupid” and “a waste of time.”
While she and I remain far apart on the benefits and risks of social media, I was delighted to realize we’re not so different when it comes to the importance of close friendships, removed from performative consumerism.
The kid who’d interrupted her friends at lunch “was irritating, because it was uncalled for, and it interrupted a friend who was already talking,” she told me. “And I felt it was a way for him to show off a new shirt that I didn’t particularly care for.”
