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The Cranberries - Linger
Email Babe
posted December 22, 2025
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The Email Babe lives in a metropolitan area, perhaps one considered “up and coming.” I’m sensing she’d do well in cities like Toronto or Seattle or London, something approachably gritty. As the name might imply, she’s career-focused, with an arts-adjacent job and lots of connections. She spends a lot of time communicating—emailing, paging, texting—depending on the device in front of her. Her life is the year 1998’s take on modern woman–independent, fashionable, high-achieving.
Remember oxygen bars? The Email Babe is the type of person to be at one, checking her Palm Pilot for replies from clients. She moves easily between sincerity and competence, softness and control. I imagine her apartment is a perfect mixture of high-tech and bohemian, all duochrome fabrics and bead curtains and bowls of potpourri.
Her fashion sense, too, is both feminine (like lingerie-inspired blouses and lacy cardigans) and boyish (t-shirts, hoodies with a blazer over top). It’s like, yeah, she’s kind of a hippie, an “old soul,” but she’s also extremely contemporary. Most of her non-vintage clothes are from Express or Marc Jacobs, maybe Prada or Jean Paul Gaultier if she wants to splurge. Think a lot of silk, cowl-necks, sequins, dark wash bootcut jeans—textures both sumptuous and casual, flattering shapes, a little bit of sparkle but not too much. Earthy-glam.
Natalie Imbruglia pairs an athletic-style t-shirt with a structured denim skirt, mixing delicate jewelry with a utilitarian statement digital watch.
She always has a cute haircut, whether it’s a slightly shaggy pixie cut or flippy, face-framing layers, usually accompanied by a zigzag part. Email Babe has the bone structure to pull off any kind of haircut, so she goes for those more daring. Her jewelry is usually simple and delicate, like large hoop earrings and a dainty lariat necklace.
The Email Babe is probably in her 30s, so she’s a lot more self-assured than other “fashion subgenres.” More Sex and the City than Girls. And as much as she loves her socially successful lifestyle, she probably does, deep down, want to settle down at some point. Her standards are high, though, so dating has always felt like a waste of time. By the 2000s, she imagines she’ll have met someone—an architect, an art professor, someone in her orbit—though she rarely pauses long enough to test the theory. She has a signature scent, Clinique’s Happy, but has CK One and Gucci Rush in her rotation as well. Something to catch peoples’ attention while sitting at the bar waiting for a cosmo.
Remember oxygen bars? The Email Babe is the type of person to be at one, checking her Palm Pilot for replies from clients. She moves easily between sincerity and competence, softness and control. I imagine her apartment is a perfect mixture of high-tech and bohemian, all duochrome fabrics and bead curtains and bowls of potpourri.
Her fashion sense, too, is both feminine (like lingerie-inspired blouses and lacy cardigans) and boyish (t-shirts, hoodies with a blazer over top). It’s like, yeah, she’s kind of a hippie, an “old soul,” but she’s also extremely contemporary. Most of her non-vintage clothes are from Express or Marc Jacobs, maybe Prada or Jean Paul Gaultier if she wants to splurge. Think a lot of silk, cowl-necks, sequins, dark wash bootcut jeans—textures both sumptuous and casual, flattering shapes, a little bit of sparkle but not too much. Earthy-glam.
She always has a cute haircut, whether it’s a slightly shaggy pixie cut or flippy, face-framing layers, usually accompanied by a zigzag part. Email Babe has the bone structure to pull off any kind of haircut, so she goes for those more daring. Her jewelry is usually simple and delicate, like large hoop earrings and a dainty lariat necklace.
Muses: Dido, Natalie Imbruglia, and Sonique.
The Email Babe is probably in her 30s, so she’s a lot more self-assured than other “fashion subgenres.” More Sex and the City than Girls. And as much as she loves her socially successful lifestyle, she probably does, deep down, want to settle down at some point. Her standards are high, though, so dating has always felt like a waste of time. By the 2000s, she imagines she’ll have met someone—an architect, an art professor, someone in her orbit—though she rarely pauses long enough to test the theory. She has a signature scent, Clinique’s Happy, but has CK One and Gucci Rush in her rotation as well. Something to catch peoples’ attention while sitting at the bar waiting for a cosmo.
I’ve fashioned the Email Babe after what CARI indexes as “Gen X Soft Club.” It’s a retroactively-named aesthetic movement from the mid-to-late ‘90s to early-2000s, a swirl of satiny finishes, popping colors, and ringlight-clean lighting. She’s inspired by Dido and Fiona Apple and Natalie Imbruglia’s moody music and sultry fashion, their crouched-vulnerable-girl-artist who could quickly turn into a badass-girlboss-owning-it.
She’s not someone I grew up wanting to be, mostly because I could never imagine myself so productive and stylish—so apparently at ease in the world. Women like her seemed born knowing how to confidently hail taxis, how to answer emails quickly and correctly, how to balance softness and intelligence and good taste without trying too hard. I assumed that kind of social fluency was innate, and therefore unavailable to me.
But as I started writing this essay, I realized maybe there was a comparison to be made. Maybe I am an Email Babe in my own way—not the sleek, efficient version, but a sloppier, less organized offshoot. A version who does most of her work at a computer instead of on a Palm Pilot at an oxygen bar. I’m a much more bland and predictable version of Carrie Bradshaw, tapping away in my pre-war apartment, asking rhetorical questions to an imagined audience and hoping I’ll figure it out eventually.
She’s not someone I grew up wanting to be, mostly because I could never imagine myself so productive and stylish—so apparently at ease in the world. Women like her seemed born knowing how to confidently hail taxis, how to answer emails quickly and correctly, how to balance softness and intelligence and good taste without trying too hard. I assumed that kind of social fluency was innate, and therefore unavailable to me.
But as I started writing this essay, I realized maybe there was a comparison to be made. Maybe I am an Email Babe in my own way—not the sleek, efficient version, but a sloppier, less organized offshoot. A version who does most of her work at a computer instead of on a Palm Pilot at an oxygen bar. I’m a much more bland and predictable version of Carrie Bradshaw, tapping away in my pre-war apartment, asking rhetorical questions to an imagined audience and hoping I’ll figure it out eventually.
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