Are you a clean girl, soft girl, robe girl or a warm girl? Or are you as overwhelmed as I am with the amount of ‘aesthetic’ tribes TikTok is telling us we should be part of? As another aesthetic gets churned out of the trend cycle, my latest attempt at forming an identity for myself goes out with it – ironic, when the very concept of adopting a certain look and the label that goes with it is supposed to be a way to visually signal who you are. Instead, digitally-driven aesthetic trends have become so niche and so fleeting that they’re actually hindering Gen Z’s ability to find ourselves. We’ve somehow disconnected ways of dressing from the ways of being that they used to represent.
Visual labels aren’t new
The concept of aesthetics is centuries old – tracing back to at least the 1700s, a branch of philosophy and art that focused on qualifying ‘taste’ and ‘beauty’. This eventually evolved into the current mainstream understanding of ‘aesthetics’ as categorising the way we present and visually identify ourselves. For the past 50 years popular aesthetics have shaped culture – think jock, emo, horse girls, preppy kids. You instantly know what the labels mean, how they would dress, and to a certain extent their personalities.
Fast forward to today, digital platforms including Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok have accelerated the production of increasingly specific aesthetics that are now pop culture and fashion. There’s night luxe, the infamous ‘That Girl’ look, and millions of posts under soft girl hashtags on TikTok with women all presenting a certain way. These trends are harder to articulate and understand, seem to spawn new versions or disappear altogether at a much faster rate than other lifestyle aesthetics from decades past.
The difference between these aesthetics could be how they were created: a ‘bottom up’ vs a ‘top down’ approach.
babe wake up new weird micro label for people to describe themselves as pic.twitter.com/NV5IWiNvMc
— joanie (@pbjcowgirl) October 11, 2022
Community vs Aesthetic
The top-down approach is when a person discovers an aesthetic and adopts it. For example, if someone discovers Dark Academia moodboards, decides they like the vibe and starts bringing a book everywhere they go and signs up for a philosophy course. It also occurs when media outlets assign a label to the fashion, beauty and styling decisions made by celebrities or social media users in an attempt to categorise it as a trend for consumption, where a trend may not actually exist.
The bottom-up approach is when an aesthetic organically evolves from of the activities, choices, preferences and behaviours of a community of like-minded people. These groups share something more than just an aesthetics, they have interests in common – the long, dark fringes and black eyeliner of Emo kids is accompanied by the shared love of the music genre, going to those gigs and being influenced by each other in the real world. For bottom-up aesthetics, those who adopt only the looks without also participating in the culture are often labelled posers (derogatory).
Aesthetic categories that have had greater longevity seem to all have developed from a community and subculture, bottom-up style. The boho look that dominates festivals traces right back to the hippies attending Woodstock in the 60s; skater guys and girls come from, yes, skateboarding culture; even the Christian Fall Girl aesthetic persists because of the shared beliefs, lifestyles and modesty culture that young Christian women in Middle America participate in. The aesthetics are driven by real people who have a shared context, creating genuine communities and subcultures – that is what the aesthetic label really applies to.
On the other hand, a lot of the modern aesthetics driven by content on digital platforms is devoid of a real, underlying community. Labels like Y2K and ‘Mall girl’ are focused almost entirely on visuals or the glorification of everyday tasks, and exist only online. They are categorised under the pervasive term “viral trend” — something that can be explained, imitated, advertised, and purchased. To make more money, capitalism demands that new, more specific aesthetics are constantly created, no matter how unrelatable, wasteful or untethered to real life. What is a “Clean But Messy Robe Girl” and why do I need to buy fuzzy ankle weights to achieve this aesthetic?
@angemariano 🌕Twilightcore🌕 #twilight #twilightsaga #twilighttiktok #twilightcore #twilightmovie #bellaswan #bellaswanaesthetic #twilightaesthetic #bellaswancullen #cullen #edwardcullen #vampires #2010s #werewolf #bellaswanaesthetic ♬ McKenzie – Houndmouth
Aesthetic-jumping is a misguided path to community
I definitely don’t blame our generation for jumping from aesthetic to aesthetic. A Meta report from earlier in 2022 found that while Gen Z prize individuality, we also “crave the connections that communities create.” We have spent three very critical learning and growing years inside and online, physically isolated from each other. Whilst older generations were able to interact with different communities and interests to form their identities in those crucial years of young adulthood, we’ve been forced to latch on to trends related to our frankly very limited life experience. We’ve romanticised mundane tasks and called it ‘an aesthetic’ in an attempt to find a label that fits and establish a community under it.
But it’s hollow. Goths, jocks, even Disney Adults have things in common that they enjoy. Are the Gen Z equivalents defined by anything we actually enjoy participating in?
These constant and ever-changing rules that come with each aesthetic can be draining. It’s difficult to simply be yourself because of the pressure to follow the expectations of the label, cosplaying a shallow identity instead of finding your own, in an effort to belong. And ironically, it’s now so difficult to find any common ground or genuine community with new trends, or “cores” cropping up every other week.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t try out different looks, but the hobbies or interests should probably be prioritised over the visual aesthetic. And be aware of how these trends make you feel. Do you really see yourself reading the book that you’re carrying everywhere you go, or is it a photo prop for IG?
Comments are closed.