The Quirked-Up White Boy is Hollywood’s new favourite muse

When Timothée Chalamet sprung from the backseat of a grey Cupra at the 75th Berlinale, he was feeling a little, shall we say, adventurous. While his red carpet companions had chosen ball gowns and black tie, Chalamet swaggered about in pastel pink Chrome Hearts: low slung leather pants, a hoodie three sizes too big, and some perfectly colour-matched Timbs. Soon the hoodie was whipped off, revealing lily-white limbs poking from a matching pink vest. Just days before that, Billie Eilish ascended the stage at the 2025 Grammys to perform her hit “Birds of a Feather”. The singer’s colossal sports jersey, from Martine Rose, swung over a pair of ultra wide jeans, whose hems pooled at a pair of chunky Etnies trainers, finished with a fitted cap on top. While all this was going on, Hollywood veteran Justin Bieber bounced around bicoastal hangouts in his own selection of sagging pants, suede slippers and burly lined jackets. So, what do these three überfamous wardrobes have in common? Well, they all sing from the sheet of the Quirked-Up White Boy, of course.

For those of you who may not be familiar, the Quirked-Up White Boy has a little bit of swag. The Quirked-Up White Boy busts it down sexual style. The Quirked-Up White Boy may even be goated with the sauce. If those words mean nothing to you then that’s probably a good thing – but they meant something when @minga_ tweeted them out on a Friday afternoon in 2021. As the meme goes, if the Quirked-Up White Boy is simply a white boy with a little bit of swag, then these three have it in abundance. Their current wardrobes include (but are not limited to) baggy streetwear and backwards fitted caps, floral Prada shirts and McQueen skull scarves, Timberland boots and box fresh Bapes, diamond chains and ironic Ugg slippers, sagging jeans and snazzy specs, True Religion denim and beaten-in workwear. In this way, the Quirked-Up White Boy is both current and callback. The Quirked-Up White Boy is a 90s B-Boy doing an NBA tunnel walk in the era of 2010s #swag. The Quirked-Up White Boy is a fashion amalgamation, rehashing bygone periods of cool via today’s hottest brands.

So, the QUWB – a word I have decided is pronounced ‘cube’ – is emerging as a young Hollywood aesthetic. But if the QUWB is being quirked, then what is it being quirked by? The eagle-eyed readers out there might’ve noticed that, of the laundry list of styles above, some of them reference Blackness, or at least mainstream signifiers of African American style from the past 40 years or so. While the looks are by no means straight cosplay, they are, at their core, indebted to that style. To be white and to be quirked, in the fashion sense, is to be influenced by the long arm of US Black culture, specifically the East and West Coast fashion of rappers from the 90s until today. You may balk at the phrase ‘goated with the sauce’ and some such concoctions, but tell me these three aren’t dealing in the aesthetics of white boy swag?

Black style isn’t the only thing doing the operative quirking. Chalamet’s recent looks have run the gamut from college Frat boy to Ibizan superclub owner and literal Bob Dylan, while Eilish often looks like a Canadian hockey player on leave. Having said that, it’s difficult to ignore the influence in these looks, especially when you scratch even slightly below the surface. As reported by American GQ last week, Bieber has recently left the care of longtime stylist Karla Welch – whose roster includes Olivia Wilde, Karlie Kloss and Sarah Paulson – to work with the newly minted Jenna Tyson. Tyson’s clients include Gunna, Future, Flo Milli and James Harden. Similarly, Chalamet began working with Taylor McNeill in 2024 for the Bob Dylan press tour, and has continued to work with her since. McNeill’s most famous client is Kendrick Lamar.

Rapping ‘Roman’s Revenge’ in a pink wig at a high school talent contest, Lil Timmy Tim was the Quirked-Up White Boy manifest, a cultural product of swagcore aesthetics and DatPiff.com

Chalamet’s current QUWB era has also seen the spiritual return of Lil Timmy Tim, the actor’s teenage rap persona. Rapping Nicki Minaj’s “Roman’s Revenge” in a pink wig at a high school talent contest, Lil Timmy Tim was the Quirked-Up White Boy manifest, a cultural product of swagcore aesthetics and DatPiff.com. Today, that custom pink Chrome Hearts look is lifted straight from the Timmy Tim playbook. Recently, the actor also sat courtside with Spike Lee in a backwards cap with purple trackies tucked into Uggs, a look that seemed to evoke his 2010s rap persona, too. 

Elsewhere, the wider internet culture has also noticed the QUWB’s indebtedness to rappers. While Bieber’s interactions with Black culture have been varying and well-documented, Eilish’s have not as much. Though her signature style has drawn comparisons to rappers, namely Missy Elliott, things went into overdrive last year when Eilish and Spencer Singer leaned even more heavily into masculine fashion, dressing in billowing basketball shorts, baggy Ralph Lauren polos and New Era baseball caps. A viral tweet from Eilish’s Chicken Shop Date appearance last year asked “why she always dressed like Chingy” in reference to a green bandana look, while another poked fun at her somewhat toned down outfit for NPR’s Tiny Desk, which often features Black choir singers. “She knew not to be dressed like Biggie around black people,” it joked. And while this might be a great time to acknowledge my awareness of Eilish as a woman and not a white boy, is an explanation even needed? Not only is her style clearly rooted in masculinity, she’s practically leading the QUWB pack at this point.

But while JB, Timmy Tim and Biggie Eilish might be the prime examples of the Quirked-Up White Boy, there are others. The QUWB has seemed to infiltrate Hollywood’s fictional universes, too. Though for the majority of Babygirl, Harris Dickinson’s Samuel wears bargain-bin officewear and a giant green parka, there’s that one hotel scene where he has a bit of quirk. Meeting Nicole Kidman at a sketchy motel, Samuel saunters into the room in a baggy tracksuit top zipped down to the sternum, revealing a white vest and chain below. It’s subtle, but the QUWB principles are there, which makes sense as Harris does in fact bust it down sexual style in the film. Less subtle, however, is Mark Eydelshteyn’s freewheeling party boy Ivan in Anora. From the purple Versace bathrobe to the Gucci monogrammed tracksuit and the hoodies that swamp his frame, Ivan’s style is almost all-out QUWB. Also, the quirk has seemed to spill ever so slightly into Eydelshteyn’s real life wardrobe too, as the actor attended Balenciaga’s recent AW25 show in one of Demna’s eye-catching, oversized jackets and the label’s G-Star knockoff jeans.

Despite these findings, however, QUWB culture is a spectrum, and no two QUWBs are necessarily the same. While IRL Eydelshteyn and on-screen Harris seem less concerned with the tenets of Black culture, their whiteness quirked by other means, Chalamet, Eilish and Bieber’s styles definitely are. I think of all Quirked-Up White Boys more as existing on a live axis with lines that crest and fall, rather than a one-size-fits-all. Of course, like with any style, nothing is actually new. Of QUWBs gone by, the slacker style of Adam Sandler walked so that Eilish could run, while Robin Williams’ madcap red carpet moments, from trompe-l’œil Jean Paul Gaultier to Issey Miyake bomber jackets, have a direct throughline to Chalamet’s own. Outside of Hollywood, the concept of the swagged white boy has always existed, but we’re sure to see him extend further due to Chalamet’s current intense menswear influence. In some ways, that could present its own unique set of problems (the appreciation vs appropriation debate rages on), so I guess the real question is, are you all really ready for that? If so, sit down, strap in, and prepare to be quirked.