"The French are obsessed with chic," says Camille Charrière. "They would rather be chic than hot, or cool, or interesting-looking. That's something I found very claustrophobic."

The fashion writer and author of forthcoming memoir Ashamed left France for the UK when she was 26, "to escape chic". So it's unfortunate for her that we're all now obsessed with it too.

It's hard to pinpoint when it began, but we've all seen the symptoms. Ballet flats shuffling back into our wardrobes. Women storming a Manhattan pharmacy in search of Caroline Bessette-Kennedy's headbands. The rabid rush to taxonomise the chic and the un-chic in a way that even Nicky Haslam might consider elitist. Bare fingernails are chic. Leather flip-flops are chic. Brown mascara, after years as a frumpy punchline, is suddenly chic. Brown everything, in fact, as fashionable wardrobes are now awash with more chocolate than Willy Wonka's factory.

But the concept stretches far beyond aesthetics. Things I have personally described as 'chic' in the past week include: short novels, rye bread and having a 40-year-old husband. With its roots in the German regional schick, meaning 'tact, skill, know-how', as well as the more recent French chique, meaning 'relaxed manner', it's a word with as much to say about the way we do things as the way we look. Chic is a sensibility, almost impossible to describe but, as with porn, increasingly less with AI, you know it when you see it.

It's understated, but considered. It's premium but not flashy. It's a retro-leaning reaction to the vulgarities of modern life. Reading a newspaper is chic. Handwritten thank-you notes are chic. Town hall weddings are chic, until you follow them up with the huge do a week later. Not being on social media is chic, except then nobody knows how chic you are.

And that's the Schrödinger's chic of it all. That nothing could be less chic than talking incessantly about how 'kinda chic' everything is. Once a rarefied commodity gets taken up by the masses, it immediately loses its sheen. Et voila! Chic has become de trop.

"We're talking about a word that could now mean anything," says Charrière. "A few years ago it was 'brat', then it was 'quiet luxury', now it's been rebranded as 'chic'," she shrugs. Gallically. "The word has been so diluted that it's kind of become slop."

Yet something about chic runs deeper than your average flash-in-the-pan internet slang. Perhaps it's because the rise of the word has dovetailed with the return of minimalism as an aesthetic, and to some extent as a wellness aspiration. In an oversaturated, overconsuming, overwhelming society, I think it's telling that we're reaching for 'chic' as a way to validate the alternative. It's chic to age naturally, we tell each other, when the Botox pressure gets too much. It's chic to go on holiday in the UK. Chic to have a capsule wardrobe, chic to have a small, cluttered home.

Then there's the word's continental origins, which have held power over the fashion girlies for centuries. "Even today, industries of taste like fashion, food and lifestyle are dominated by French loanwords," says Christian Ilbury, Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh. He points to examples like boutique, haute couture and à la carte as demonstrating an "abstract association of French with refinement and luxury."

But while we Brits can have fun flinging around our adopted words and corrupting their meaning (kinda chic to eat your steak well done!), across the Channel, chic is still a serious business.

"There is a right and a wrong. And when you stray, you get death stares from strangers or comments from family and friends on the length of your skirt, or the colours you've put together," says Charrière. "It makes me ill! And yet, it's been ingrained into me. It's something that I still think about way too much." She credits France's revolutionary past with breeding this culture of conformity, as opposed to Britain's rich history of subversive subcultures, like punk. "We didn't need to have any political vocabulary in our clothes, because it already happened in our streets."

As a frazzled Englishwoman whose personal style lands somewhere between Miss Piggy and Su Pollard, I've long lamented the fact that I will never truly be chic. I can do a decent impression of it, if I try really hard and get the ironing board out, but look closely and there will always be a detail awry; a jazzy brooch, a fun sock, some other little clue destined to out me as the gaudy maximalist I really am.

But perhaps that's something to celebrate. Because in The Great Chic Rush of 2024-6, we've seen the concept translated badly; it's become a flattening of creativity and individuality into something blandly palatable and uniformly beige. Neutral palettes, copy-paste outfits, clean-girl everything. Le freak, c'est not chic by today's algorithm, and in a world where liberté is under threat for many marginalised groups, that feels kinda sinister.

"It's almost like you're taking away every marker of what it means to be a person," says Charrière. "There's no room for messiness."

Or sexiness, or flamboyance. Notably when Dolly Parton died and the internet flooded with words of love and admiration, 'chic' was not among them. Maybe it should have been? "Chic to me is about how you treat others, how you move through the world," she says. "It's got nothing to do with finding the right pair of jeans."

So which is it? Does chic mean careful adherence to the rules of taste and style, or marching to the beat of your own drum? Can a maximalist ever be chic? "In my world, yes," says Charrière. "Think about the way women in many Black cultures dress, with bright colours and amazing hats, that's incredibly chic. Or Iris Apfel, piling on the layers and the necklaces. So fucking chic! It's a point of view."

The truth is, chicness is deliberately hard to pin down. If it has no clear rules, then it can remain a hazy, shapeshifting thing, defined by gatekeepers who would rather keep the perimeters narrow. Air-dried hair is chic... provided yours dries like an Olsen twin. Cigarettes are chic... as long as you don't get cancer. Being thin is, unfortunately, perennially chic, but being on GLP-1s to achieve it is not. If the chic are simply chic from birth and there's no hope for the rest of us, it certainly puts a damper on every makeover montage ever made.

But here's the twist: the avalanche of chic might all be an illusion. According to Google Trends, the word isn't being searched for any more frequently now than it was five years ago, and in fact usage is down since the mid-2010s (remember shabby chic?). Meanwhile data from Google Books shows two peaks of the word's usage in print; one in 1928, and one in 2008. So why does it feel so ubiquitous right now?

"Social media makes things more visible," explains Ilbury. "Words, and linguistic features and varieties, which are actually used very infrequently, are suddenly thrown into the spotlight." He likens it to "demure", which had its moment in the sun in 2024. "We come across a trend, interact with it, see more of it, and think that the word has exploded because of social media, when in fact, it's just made it more visible, and likely in a way that's not very persistent."

So is chic on the wane? "I think so," he says. "Seeing big companies jump on the bandwagon is often the first sign. The fact that the first video I see in my TikTok search is 'kinda chic to book a city break in EasyJet's big orange sale' suggests it's not very chic at all."

But perhaps before we bin the word, we should be grateful to the trend for reclaiming chic for the basic masses. In busting the concept out from behind its barricades, we give it less power to make us feel inferior, or like we need to spend £800 on a trench coat.

Or as Charrière puts it: "You know when people say 'I'm cringe and I'm free'? I want that. I don't want to be chic! I want to be free."

(At the time of writing, she is still incredibly chic).