Why Generation Z stopped kissing in public

CULTURE · BEHAVIOUR

The public kiss has become an endangered species. Two strangers on a dance floor, a couple pressed against the wall of a bar, a pair lost in each other on a city bench: for decades these were the ordinary choreography of a Saturday night. For Generation Z they look increasingly like period scenes, belonging to another way of living the night, desire and chance.

Kisses caught by flash

That sense of loss runs through Hello, I Love You, a book by the British photographer Derek Ridgers published by Idea Books. Most of its pictures were taken in the early 1980s, in London clubs such as Hell in Covent Garden, Le Beat Route and the Camden Palace, on the street in Hammersmith and Chelsea, and in suburban venues beyond. The couples are caught mid-kiss, oblivious, celebrating the instant with no sign of calculation.

Ridgers worked with a modest flash rigged on a wire coat hanger, and he rarely knew his subjects before or saw them again. Kissing couples, he has said, make up a tiny fraction of everything he shot in those years. Yet gathered together they describe an era in which going out meant meeting people without a script: kissing someone you might never see again, sometimes more than one person in a night, not as performance but from curiosity and impulse. The kiss was a rite of passage, not a post.

Intimacy, rehearsed at home

Today the sequence runs the other way. Dating apps let compatibility be assessed before anyone meets. Intimacy begins in the controlled setting of home, mediated by screens, messages and expectations agreed in advance. Public space, once the stage for improvisation, has become watched territory, and spontaneity gives way to the protection of one’s image.

The smartphone is the decisive presence. The chance of being filmed, photographed or exposed online turns any impulsive gesture into a calculated risk. What was once an anecdote told badly the next morning can now circulate among strangers within minutes. The night has lost some of its freedom because it now demands aesthetic awareness and narrative control.

When everything can be recorded

This permanent surveillance changes the culture of the public kiss. It is not simply a question of modesty or shifting morals, but of a broader change in how desire is lived. The kiss has stopped being an ephemeral event and become potential content. And when everything can be recorded, a great deal simply stops happening.

It would be too easy to say that this generation has less fun or feels less. Pleasure and connection have reorganised themselves, with other codes, other spaces, other languages. What may be lost is the brief abandon of being out of control, handed over to the chance of the night.

Turning the pages of Ridgers’ book, it is not only the kisses that hold the eye but the atmosphere around them: a nightlife less choreographed and less self-aware, where mistakes were part of the experience and embarrassment carried no lasting cost.

Perhaps kissing in public has not quite gone out of fashion. Perhaps it has simply become out of place in a world that demands constant curation of the self. Looking at those photographs, it is hard not to feel that something essential has been left behind: not the kiss itself, but the freedom to have it without witnesses, without archives, without fear.

GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.