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Each year, the trend of the summer emerges like smoke from the Vatican. Two years ago, it was hot pink, officially heralding Barbiecore summer’s arrival. Then, 12 months later, a new plume was lime green to signify the start of Brat summer. Now, the faithful wait in sweltering temperatures to get their marching orders for 2025. Will this be a Lorde summer, as many punters have predicted? An Addison Rae summer? Maybe even a Krypto the Dog from Superman summer? No, this year the smoke was blown away by a British budget airliner. It’s officially a Jet 2 Holiday Summer.
For weeks now, much of the internet has been consumed with videos that riff on an ad campaign for Britain’s largest tour operator, Jet2holidays. The meme has flourished on TikTok, where audio from a 2024 ad — the poppy sounds of Jess Glynne’s 2015 song “Hold My Hand” mixed with the cheerful voiceover of a British woman assuring viewers that “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” — is overlaid against videos of vacationers experiencing calamity. They bounce wildly into the air from inflatables behind speedboats, accidentally light themselves on fire with birthday candles, experience near disaster while white-water rafting, almost drown in a few feet of water after shooting down a slide, or are waterboarded with liquor in a nightclub by a person in a Pink Panther costume. If Barbiecore Summer was about embracing frivolity and pink perfection, and Brat Summer was about reveling in grunge and neon depravity, then a Jet 2 Holiday Summer is about reluctantly accepting chaos as our new normal, trying to have a vacation in it anyway, and subsequently falling down the stairs or suffering whatever other catastrophe may hit us.
It’s the juxtaposition of mayhem and music that makes each Jet2 Holiday clip so perfect and enjoyable. It’s also what’s made the meme not just one of the biggest of 2025 (it’s been used in over a million posts), but something of a worldwide phenomenon. It has drawn global media attention to the aviation operator and boosted the career of Glynne, whose fans now scream the commercial during her performances. Even the ad’s voiceover artist, Zoë Lister, has blown up, performing her lines in media interviews and in front of an adoring crowd at an outdoor DJ set.
The Jet2 Holiday sensation also caught the attention of Terrence O’Connor. A creative director and photographer (as well as the boyfriend of Overcompensating star Benito Skinner), O’Connor was instrumental in helping his friend Charli XCX with the social media strategy that made Brat such a phenomenon last year — which means he’s rather well placed to opine on the defining cultural trend of summer 2025. In a video posted on July 19 to his 132,000 TikTok followers, O’Conner declared that he’d officially seen enough: “It’s a Jet2 Holiday Summer whether you like it or not,” he said. “Most things from the past few weeks, or even the past few months, can really be bucketed under that label.” He then goes on to list some of the more troubling aspects of our current fuck-around-and-find-out era, from the frivolous ( C-suite types canoodling at a Coldplay concert) to the egregious (Trump supporters suffering from buyer’s remorse, thanks to his handling of the so-called Epstein Files or cuts to government services.)
Donald Trump, of course, is chiefly responsible for the chaos many of us feel echoing through the culture right now. As he once again “infects every aspect of our daily lives,” as The Onion so aptly put it, it’s no surprise that Trump — freshly reinstated to power, armed with a list of enemies and facing seemingly no accountability — is at the center of this moment. It’s because of him that our institutions and social safety nets are actively crumbling around us, and the safeguards of the past are being slowly dismantled. And like a stone thrown into a lake, his influence ripples out across all facets of our culture. Consider him the captain of our Jet2 Holiday aircraft. But as you do so, remember that people actively chose to return to this state of precariousness. During the election last year, the country was presented with a choice of continuing with business as usual or risking a gamble by taking a trip on an airline we knew to be low-class and cheap, but which was promising an unbeatable vacation. Now, we’ve been well and truly struck by turbulence.
As this Jet 2 Holiday Summer continues, think of all the others who have been embodying its messy promise of anarchy: The Republican lawmakers regrettably discovering the ugly provisions inside the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill only after they voted to enact it. CBS torching two of its tentpole prestige programs, 60 Minutes and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, amid a defamation lawsuit brought by the president. The sudden rise, and incredible mess, of Love Island USA. Elon Musk’s AI bot, Grok, going full Nazi. Musk and Trump having a very public breakup. The disgusting yet addictive opulence and crassness of the Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez wedding. Katy Perry going through a breakup after going into space. All around us we can see chaos reign and people falling off their metaphorical jet skis. And just like on TikTok, I can’t look away.
And so it is that we’ve found ourselves in the middle of a deeply unusual summer that all many of us know for certain feels different to last year’s. (Hell, if you needed any more proof Brat Summer wasn’t returning, consider that Charli XCX got married last week.) Unlike in 2024, there’s less hedonistic pleasure to be had in the mess we’re in now because it doesn’t necessarily feel like one of our own making. It’s just one big shitshow — and there’s no clean-up crew in sight. But at the end of the day, all we can really do is try to make the best of this trip we’re on together. It’s a Jet2 Holiday Summer, and as Glynne sings in the ad that kicked it all off, “Darling, hold my hand.”
