Having a flavor to gravitate to when summer is ending can be comforting, she says. Nature - and capitalism - abhors a vacuum.
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It seems there was an opportunity for an early-fall flavor, lodged somewhere between the bright fruits of summer and the looming array of holiday tastes, from peppermint to gingerbread. Nearly two decades later, we're in pumpkin spice's fourth wave, where one can order a pumpkin-spiced cold brew without a side of baggage or irony - thanks to those early pioneers, of course, but also thanks to the vagaries of human nature and the food marketers who understand it. Eventually the Basic Beckys of the world embraced it as their totem, celebrated on T-shirts and mugs with sayings like "Leggings, boots & pumpkin spice."
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As its popularity spread on then-nascent social media feeds, "pumpkin spice became the ultimate symbol of basicness," as my colleague Maura Judkis noted in 2017.
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So how did pumpkin spice assume its own spot on the list of flavors one can enjoy without making a big thing out of it? Let's go back for a moment to the olden days of 2003, when Starbucks introduced its seasonal latte spiked with the warming flavors of baking spices. No one bases their personality on preferring strawberry ice cream over chocolate, or ascribes a persona to those who do. Thomas’ pumpkin-spice-flavored English muffins are among the numerous pumpkin spice breakfast foods on store shelves this year. "But then these boots became part of our lives." "It was either, 'Oh, that's a bubble that's going to burst,' or 'We're never wearing these again,'" she says. Ultra-trendy in the late 1990s and early aughts, they were soon written off by the fashion elite only to be ironically revived every so often. It's here - it's all around us."Įmily Contois, an assistant professor at the University of Tulsa who studies food and media, likened the flavor's mainstreaming to that of Uggs, those fluffy-lined boots that make their wearers look like they have baked potatoes for feet. "You can't avoid it, so you don't have to be embarrassed about enjoying it. "You are bound to run into something pumpkin-spiced - maybe pancakes or a seasonal drink," says Melanie Zanoza Bartelme, who tracks food trends for market-research firm Mintel. Now pumpkin spice season arrives like any other meteorological phenomenon. So goes it with pumpkin spice, which used to be seen as part of a lifestyle choice, a signifier of the flavor's most ardent acolytes: women (mostly White, mostly with flawless highlights) who loved brunch and cozy sweaters and pick-your-own apple orchards and painted signs in their kitchens reminding them to dream. Throw pumpkin spice into the pile of things that once served as cultural markers but now read as neutral: Denim and tattoos, for example, were once reserved for the counterculture, but now they're just as at home at the PTA as in the demimonde. Like death, taxes and new Taylor Swift albums, pumpkin spice is now merely a part of the human condition. Or rather, it seems pumpkin spice is no longer a recognizable vibe.
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The vibe, it seems, has shifted for pumpkin spice. Never mind that, back in the right-side-up world, summer sweat was still rolling down our backs.īut something feels different this year as we peruse the aisles of the grocery store, already laden with an ever-expanding assortment of cookie dough and cocoa mixes and candles scented with clove and allspice. In late August, Starbucks began selling its seasonal pumpkin spice lattes, an annual event that has become the symbolic starting pistol of the crisp, floating-leaf, cable-knit autumn of our collective imagination.