- This video is brought to you by Squarespace,
an all-in-one platform for building a brand and growing your business online. Hello,
my beautiful doves. My name is Mina. How are you doing? Today's video is gonna
be on aesthetics. So I've been wanting to talk about aesthetics for a while because I've
made a couple videos in the past talking about certain aesthetics and I think in 2020 when most
of the videos that I made came out, 2020 and 2021, we just saw like a boom in different aesthetics.
We saw like Cottagecore, dark academia, Clowncore, Goblincore, like Barbiecore, like all these
different cores. And then I feel like since 2022, the number of aesthetics that have come out have
kind of petered off and we just don't talk about them in the same kind of way. We still see a bunch
of publications promoting things like mermaid core and blueberry milk nails. I wanted to talk about that kind of shift between 2020 to
now, and even going back beforehand with the idea of subcultures and differentiating subcultures
and aesthetics. Yeah, oh my God. So much to talk about today. So let's just get started.
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your first purchase of a website or domain. First, I wanna address what is a subculture.
Merriam-Webster defines it as an ethnic, regional, economic or social group exhibiting characteristic
patterns of behavior sufficient to distinguish it from others within an embracing culture
or society. In fashion, subcultures evolved organically around a shared interest in a style
of music, literature, art or political idea, and usually developed among youth groups. Some 20th
century subculture examples include the Bright Young Things from the British interwar period,
the 1940s West Coast Hepcat and Chuco subcultures, fifties and sixties beatniks, mods and rockers,
teddy boys and hippies, seventies punk rockers, rude boys, new romantics and hip hop, eighties
goth and skate punk, nineties emo and grunge, 2000 scene and bohemian bourgeois among
so many others. As an academic area, subcultural theory was established in the 1920s
by sociology professors of the Chicago School who are interested in investigating the occurrence of
delinquency or crime. Thus, their research mostly focused on immigrants, black Americans and the
working class. Much of the research was focused on men, no surprise there, but a lot of femme-centric
subcultures were not considered threatening or taken seriously enough to be researched by
academic and journalistic institutions. Also, the rise of the concept of the teenager coincided
with the development and understanding of youth subcultures, and most sources cite the 1920s as
the early origin of subcultures as a concept, solidifying and becoming part of cultural
conversation in the 1940s through fifties. In the 1940s, the word teenager was used as a marketing
term because companies recognized that young people were becoming their own marketing segment
that had a lot of spending power. But interests that differentiated them from adults. Then in
the mid sixties, the Birmingham School emerged to analyze the new working class youth subcultures
such as teddy boys, mods, skinheads and rockers in post World War II Britain. They argued that
working class subcultures were evidence of symbolic resistance to the mainstream consumption
imperative of capitalism. But you know, despite these radical beliefs, the actual resistance
movement was quite fleeting. To the scholars, resistance was merely symbolic because there were
no subcultural career paths that these kids could transition into, and so I don't know, it kind
of like remained stagnant as this movement. It didn't alter the lives of any of these working
class kids in any kind of like economic way. This might be true for some subculture members, but
NYU professor Gregory Snyder has taken issue with the Birmingham school's theory. He spent years
studying how skate and graffiti subcultures have become self-sustaining and published a book,
"Skateboarding LA: "Inside Professional Street Skateboarding". He likens skate and graffiti
culture to being industries and explains how skaters, writers, graffiti artists are able
to monetize their alleged deviance while still self-identifying as members of a subculture. A lot
of subculture styles are resistance styles in the way that they challenge the mainstream. However,
nowadays, the mass media and the rise of fast fashion have limited the ability of young people
to use their clothes as the tools of a cultural revolution. As NEHR-EE-UH RIV-RAHL-TUH writes, The
ubiquity and accessibility of clothing have made it more difficult to make a statement with what
you wear, and it is only becoming increasingly common for growing cultural movements to find
themselves absorbed and monetized by mainstream institutions. Peter Watts wrote in a 2017 feature
for "Apollo Magazine" that there have been no unique youth tribes since emo and new rave in
the mid-2000s. He writes, There's a sense that this ties in with the rise of the internet with a
more interconnected society removing that need for intensely localized scenes which often coalesced
around a single record or clothes shop or a particular club or band. The wide availability of
music allows young people to explore sounds across genres and timeframes, which could also disrupt
that need for a tribal identity. Another example of how those digital interconnectedness has led
to a mix and match of subcultural elements is through the development of the Internet's unique
form of speech, which is actually not that unique because it's very much co-opted from AVE. For
example, words like fam were used by inner city black working class youth, and yas originated from
America's black drag scene. Because these terms have been subsumed into internet speak, they are
no longer indicators of a person's socioeconomic background. You could be a white woman from
South Carolina and use ballroom lingo just because you watch "RuPaul's Drag Race", but not
because you're actually part of this subculture. - Yas, Queen, slay. - Yomi Adegoke talks about this in her article,
"Has the Internet Killed Subcultures" for "Vogue". She writes, As we try harder than ever to
differentiate ourselves from each other, elements of subcultures are increasingly coveted
because of their connection to the fringes. Traditional media incorporations are also like
always looking for the next cool thing, AKA cool hunting, which usually means mining ideas from
the youth and what they're doing. And the reason, youth fetishism has been a thing since like
forever. American author Mark Twain noted that, Life would be infinitely happier if we could
only be born at the age of 80 and gradually approach 18. Very Benjamin Button. And going back
further, William Shakespeare dubbed old age as a hideous winter while Homer called it loathsome.
Why do we care so much about being young? Well, for women it's usually because once you surpass
the age of 25, you're told you're no longer desirable. But in general, youth as a concept
represents freedom, possibility, rebellion, beauty, fitness and potential. It signifies a
lack of responsibility and nonchalance towards consequences. It's also a period of innocence
yet to be shattered by the brutal realities of having to actually make a living for yourself and
paying taxes. Youth fetishism has also become even more prominent, I feel like, because of TikTok. So
TikTok is a platform that's very Gen Z dominated, and it's also like very popular on that platform
to dunk on Millennials, which has led a lot of members of older generations to either rebel
against that and make cringey videos defending their right to wear skinny jeans, or it leads
them to try to replicate Zoomers behaviors and fashion choices to maintain their own
sense of coolness. Adegoke goes on to say, The cycles of niches eventually being subsumed
by the mainstream has happened over generations, but the internet has sped this process up at an
unrecognizable rate. These days before subculture has fully formed, it's already been co-opted.
Combined with the rise of sample culture, different cultural touchstones are now a dress-up
box for Gen Z. This new mix and match approach to fashion and music means we now have trends over
tribes. But not everyone believes that subcultures have died off. "The Face" magazine published
an article last year analyzing the different niche youth communities on TikTok. TJ Sidhu wrote
for it: Rumors of the demise of subcultures are wangingly exaggerated. They're everywhere and you
don't even have to look that hard or get off your arse to find them. They're in your very pocket
posting stories on Instagram, selling stuff on Depop, shaking up the TikTok algorithms. And out
in the real world, today's youth are occupying spaces of their very own, dressed like they belong
to something you wouldn't understand. I think Sidhu brings up a really good point about the
niche cultures that exist all over the internet, all over social media, but I also think it's
interesting that there are people who refuse to call these niche communities subcultures.
So let's dive into the reasons behind that. Okay, there was lint all over my
microphone and hopefully none of that got caught in the first part, but it is what
it is. Similar to IRL subcultures, some of the earliest entirely internet born aesthetics were
also driven by shared passion for music genres, synthwave, nightcore, seapunk, et cetera. If
you're wondering about the core suffix, according to Aesthetics Wiki, the use of core as a suffix
comes from the phrase hardcore, a word from the 1930s, meaning an irreducible nucleus or residuum,
also a stubborn or unyielding minority. In those aesthetics that end in core, the suffix means that
the main word is the theme of the entirety of the aesthetic, i.e, all of the images in Lovecore
relate to love. Now I just wanna talk about a few of the internet aesthetics that impacted me
on my side of the internet growing up. The Health Goth subculture, for starters. This subculture
started in 2013 as a Facebook group by Portland based underground pop duo, Magic Fades', Mike
Grabarek and Jeremy Scott, alongside artist Chris Cantino. The group posted images of high tech and
exotically specialized sportswear with a sparse palette and other aspects of the so-called net art
visual style. The creators of stated: We want to create art that references evolution and relate it
back to subcultures. Things like bio-enhancement technology, anti-aging medication, and how it
all feeds into the idea of pursuing perfection. However, soon enough, the original philosophy
behind the aesthetic was co-opted by the fashion industry, reported on by "The Guardian", "The
New York Times" and "Marie Claire". I actually came across a "Cut" article back from 2014,
and it was actually kind of mind blowing. In it, the writer quotes the Portland based
artist, Wyatt Schaffner. Schaffner said at the time: Health Goth created a proto narrative of
returning to Paradise Lost by embracing mortality as a one world consciousness and devotion as means
to deliver us from late capitalism. The "Cut" then proceeds to clarify for its readers: At its
essence, wearing black, but also working out and eating right. It's having an appreciation for both
Hot Topic and Equinox. And then suggests that to find Health Goths IRL, they're probably waiting in
line for the Alexander Wang x H&M clap right now. To be honest, the Health Goth Manifesto is kind
of difficult to understand and I've reread those sections like over and over again and I don't
really think I can simplify in a way that rings true to what the creators wanted. But I will say
that it's definitely much deeper and more abstract and more political than shopping at Hot Topic and
working out at Equinox. And overall it's just like crazy that of movement and aesthetic, if you will,
that started as a critique against capitalism was co-opted into being something that promoted
capitalism. And this is not something that is unique to Health Goth, like I feel like just
in general, a lot of internet aesthetics, they started out as like organic, genuine, creative
explorations and then were taken by corporations and disseminated to the masses as trends. Another
example is Vaporwave. Vaporwave aesthetics, which include classical sculpture, anime, Fiji
bottled water, Arizona Iced Tea, drug use, vintage advertising, and late 20th century computer
hardware graphics were introduced through music visuals like the album art for the 2011 release,
Floral Shop by Macintosh Plus, or the music video for St. Pepsi's "Enjoy Yourself". The first
half of the name comes from the term vaporware, which is a corporate advertising term for
products that are advertised for release, but are never actually intended to make it to
market. For example, in 1993, Apple announced at the company's Mac World event they were developing
a phone with BellSouth called WALT, short for Wizzy Active Lifestyle Telephone. However, only
a few prototypes were produced before the concept was abandoned. The second half of Vaporwave comes
from Karl Marx. In Marx's Communist manifesto, he states all that is solid melts into air. In
this passage, Marx uses a sublimation or a waves of vapor metaphor to describe society's change
in response to being subjected to capitalism. So it's actually quite political. I don't know
if you guys know, Karl Marx was very political. As Scott Busham writes for "Esquire", the genre's
name comes from these failed promises and through its music sort of offers up an alternative history
of post-Cold War America. However, despite this, there were a lot of people who participated in
the Vaporwave aesthetic without having any kind of like political affiliations. Honestly, like when I
was on Tumblr in 2014 and when I first discovered Vaporwave, I didn't know that there was any
anti-capitalist rhetoric going on. I just remember listening to that St. Pepsi remix thinking
the song was like super retro. It was a bop, and I thought the graphics were cool, but I didn't
really think that much deeper into it. And I will say that for Vaporwave because it started or
like included a lot of music from the beginning, that people kind of were interested
in it because they liked the music, not necessarily because they liked
everything that was related to the aesthetic. Yeah, does that make sense? I'm not trying to say
that there were like no true Vaporwave artists. I think that through Tumblr mostly and other
kinds of social medias, I guess like Facebook, Pinterest, that the images were kind of muddled
and people just sort of fell into liking this aesthetic without really recognizing what it
originated as. A more concrete example of an online aesthetic whose political origins got
muddled is the Art Hoe aesthetic. Art Ho was an internet born aesthetic from the mid 2010s
invented on Tumblr by the users Mars and Jam. The term Art Hoe was chosen as a form of like a
reclamation, taking an offensive term and putting a positive spin on it for people who identify
themselves. As such jam elaborated in a Tumblr post stating that the Art Hoe movement is all
about true creative freedom for people of color, especially black women. As an aesthetic with
a well-documented inception and creators, the visuals which include mustard yellow,
stripes, impressionist paintings, plants, overalls and mom jeans, and its message, which
was uplifting young women of color through collage style insertion into art made by old
white men were clearly outlined from the start, but the look was soon copied and appropriated both
online and by major retailers. Mars explained what happened: It was getting co-opted by this little
group of skinny, frail white girls. To belong in their group, you had to have a hundred-dollar
backpack, a $20 Japanese sketchbook, shit like that. When that came to my attention, we started
to fight back and identify as a movement. So a lot of people, I think with these
early online internet aesthetics, they might consider them subcultures because
they did have like deeper meanings before they were kind of like co-opted by the internet, but
what is the difference between a subculture and aesthetic? I think that's something we definitely
have to address. And TJ Sidhu seems to imply that they're one and the same, but the difference
between a subculture and an aesthetic is that, as Louisa Rogers wrote on her blog, Online
aesthetics have little cohesion beyond a loose look and feel. I.e no physical locales to
meet up in, no uniform musical taste, no unifying political ideology or worldview. Their power
and influence is as fleeting as the content they beam out to us. But ultimately I think the major
issue is that a lot of online aesthetics grow in tandem with being commodified. Like if you take
a look at punk, which is clearly of subculture, it developed on its own first before it became
commodified by corporations. But with a lot of today's internet aesthetics like Mermaidcore
and Tomato Girl, they are introduced as they are still being developed because trend reporters
are rushing to be the first people to cover them. And yeah, essentially these aesthetics develop
alongside industries, alongside markets which are trying to profit from them. They are sold to us
as existing communities even when they're not. As Um, so I want to clarify that I think there are some aesthetic communities that actually function as actual communities, but it's rarer, and especially nowadays, because a lot of companies know that the term "aesthetic" is a buzzword, and is sure to generate some kind of press and attention, it's led to these aesthetics existing that are not actual communities that are just terms to help sell products. As Terry Wynn writes for Vox, trends of the illusion
of a trend benefit the fast fashion companies and direct to consumer brands making products that
aesthetically align with such fleeting fancies. They can also often act as major sponsors and
advertisers for content creators and publications. If you look at any fashion magazine online that is
covering a trend, usually there's a section in the article on how to shop the look. Another theory of
why subcultures have died is relating to the idea that the monoculture has died. Kyle Chayka wrote
for Vox in 2019 about the death of the monoculture that I thought was a really interesting read and I
think you should all read it if you have the time. But monoculture refers to the omnipresent
mass entertainment products like Marvel, Game of Thrones, et cetera. Chayka hypothesizes
that, rather than having like one large mainstream monoculture in existence, algorithms have
fragmented online species into taste communities. For example, my TikTok algorithm may lead me to
believe that everyone's watching the same TV show, everyone's listening to the same music, everyone's
wearing the same things, and so I misguidedly except what I see on that platform as being the
mainstream. But someone else's TikTok algorithm could show them completely different things that
they accept as their mainstream. But my mainstream and their mainstream are two different things and
therefore are not the objective mainstream. The results are, as Ana Andjelic, a brand executive
who writes about the sociology of business says, You have so many taste communities, but they
don't exist in opposition to anything. Culture has decentralized. The center, the mainstream has
disappeared. As a result, I don't think that a lot of Zoomers feel the need to be in a subculture
in the same way that older generations have had felt the need to before. Adegoke noted: For Gen
Z, shaving your head and piercing your eyebrow is probably less rebellious than when your dad did
it in the eighties. And as Ayesha Siddiqi wrote in a newsletter post, Gen Z is better able to treat
culture as a playground with less self-conscious dissonance because it's not essential to their
identity formation as it was for Millennials. For them, digital is the mainstream and it's
disposable. Being alternative doesn't have the same currency since it's an identity accessible
to anyone. So as I mentioned, I feel like in the last year or last two years, there's just been
a lot less aesthetic communities popping up in the culture, and I feel like a lot of it has to
do with the fact there was such a boom in 2020. I mean honestly like 2020 was just like the year of
trends. There weren't even just aesthetics that were popping up. There were also these micro
trends. Thankfully I haven't seen many micro trends lately since 2020, 2021, but in 2020 we had
the strawberry dress and the Hockney dress, and yeah, I just, I don't think there's anything that
really rivals that anymore. Thank God because bad for the environment to have micro trends. At the
same time, even though there's not a lot of like hype behind specific aesthetics, I don't think our
culture has cared less about aesthetics. I think people still like to aestheticize their everyday
lives, and I feel like aestheticizing your everyday life is a part of the Zoomer-Millennial
motto to romanticize your life and to be the main character of your story. These mottos are probably
a response to the turbulent political and social atmosphere of the past few decades or maybe a
consequence of being raised by the internet. Though also, they're actively encouraged by coming
of age films produced by Age 24 and Pinterest mood boards, which are both popular with Gen Z and
Millennials. Romanticization is also part of aestheticizing and performing femininity.
There are a lot of online aesthetics that partake in this girl naming convention.
So for instance, that girl, clean girl, tomato girl, sad girl, is giving one fish, two
fish, red fish, blue fish. More recently, the differentiation between types of girls has grown
increasingly specific and abstract. On TikTok, there's been a trend of categorizing girls after
fruits and vegetables. Blueberry girls, strawberry girls, onion girls, and the most popular tomato
girls, as I mentioned. TikTok-er, Becky O'Connor, theorizes the reason is: Young people,
predominantly girls, are yearning for identity and yearning for community. We're pushed more
and more towards buying things and making buying things our identity. These trends predominantly
focus around fashion and beauty standards, which are seen as being a feminine girly thing
that you shouldn't describe a time to. I think also the idea that there's like a girl out there
for everyone, there's a type of girl for everyone falls under this like personality quiz type
of fun that a lot of people like to partake in. When you do a personality quiz just
to find out which Disney princess you are, or what type of pizza you are. Buzzfeed created
an entire like market for this kind of content back in the 2010s. TikTok-er, Nicollet Laframboi,
has spoken of her support for these little labels. I know there's some controversy about there
being too many micro-aesthetics on TikTok. I love it. I think it's cute. If it makes you
feel whimsical and happy to be a tomato girl, then so be it. Beyond just like aesthetic
communities, there's also behaviors and concepts that get aestheticized, feminized names like Hot
Girl Walks and Girl Dinners. "The Dirt Newsletter" recently released a feature where they bring up
the subcultural girl slang origins. They write: Mainstream internet culture funnels its supply
of girl slang and irreverent girlhoods from the usual sources, black and queer power users.
They're girls that get it and girls that girl refrains are like catnip to grown white women
eager to languish in their own girlhoods. Add to this the Girl Blogger class of meme page
admins and internet custodians who have nurtured an ecosystem of hyper-feminine internet-cum-retail
trends like eGirl, Coconut Girl and That Girl and recall the social internet's recent
history of female domination and you get Girl Internet. Probably the first girl slang
to make it mainstream was the Hot Girl Summer, which was coined by Megan Thee Stallion. In 2019,
Megan explained what being a hot girl meant to her. She wrote, Being a hot girl is about being
unapologetically you, having fun, being confident, living your truth, being the life of the party, et
cetera. There have been rifts on Hot Girl Summer, like Feral Girl Summer, Rock Girl Summer,
Corporate Girl Summer, all of which describe their own unique set of glamorized behaviors for
the summer. Feral Girl Summer, which was coined by TikTok creator, Molly, is described as a season
for raging to house music until 7:00 AM surviving off vodka sodas and waking up in the afternoon
to have McDonald's for breakfast. Basically, it's living your best life without giving an
iota of thought to the notion of propriety or self-care, a way to make up for lost time
during the stultifying days of the pandemic and a refreshing perspective in an age where
picture perfect green juices and Pilates routines are taking over our FYPs. Hot Girl Walks then
rose to prominence on TikTok in 2021. Mia Lind, the TikTok content creator and creator of the
Hot Girl Walk explains: The Hot Girl Walk is a four mile outdoor walk where you can only think
about three things, things you're grateful for, your goals, and how you want to achieve them, and
how hot you are. The mission of the Hot Girl Walk is to continue to unite and empower women through
physical and mental wellness that's accessible to all. Getting dressed up and feeling your best is
also very much a part of the Hot Girl Walk culture because when you feel great, you stand a little
taller. Most recently we've had the concept of girl dinners going viral. The trend started when
Olivia Mayer posted a video on TikTok extolling the virtues of a humble, medieval, peasant
inspired assemblage that she called girl dinner. According to the New York Times, a girl dinner
is akin to an aesthetically pleasing Lunchable, an artfully arranged pile of snacks that when
consumed in high enough volume constitutes a meal, or so the thinking goes. Typical girl dinners may
include some kind of fruit, a block of cheddar, sliced salami, a sleeve of fancy crackers, and a
dish of olives. Girl dinner is both chaotic and filling, as one TikTok commenter put it, requiring
none of the forethought cooking or plating demanded by an actual meal. As another commenter
observed, It's a no preparation just vibes. Mayer explains the origin. I think the concept
of girl dinner came to me while I was on a hot girl walk with another female friend of mine. We
love eating that way and it feels like such a girl dinner because we do it when our boyfriends aren't
around and we don't have to have what's a typical dinner, essentially with a protein and a veggie
and a starch. The girl dinner is not without her naysayers, with some people criticizing an not
TikTok as being like eating disorder behavior because a lot of the girl dinner photos and
videos people have been putting out have kind of like mouse-like, rodent-like portion sizes.
However, Seema Rao an art historian in Cleveland, challenges that saying, The idea of cooking dinner
was historically women's work in the home. What I like about girl dinner is it takes away the idea
that you have to cook anything. You just literally put it together. So you go from the position where
the production of the food is what makes it good and makes you a valid woman to the idea that
having food is what makes you a valid woman. As Jessica Roy writes for the New York Times,
Implicit in Girl Dinner is the rejection of the picturesque, put together version of femininity
championed by aspirational content, combating the rhetoric of hustle culture and suggesting a
declining interest in wellness trends that revolve around the labor of self-op optimization. However,
in my opinion, like feral girl summer, I think that even though girl dinner is not objectively
aesthetic, it's not like a beautiful plate or anything, it's still aestheticizing eating dinner.
It's just shifted the standard so that mess is now the aesthetic goal you want to achieve, rather
than like a perfectly plated dish. But don't get me wrong, for the most part, I'm probably
romanticizing your life. Like I think that sometimes you just need to see the world through
rose colored glasses, right? And if having a girl dinner makes you feel like you're charcuterie
board of leftover foods, snack foods in the refrigerator and pantry is something cool and fun
to have, then so be it. Like do that, enjoy your life. The only thing that I'm a little concerned
about is that I think over categorization can sometimes lead to self-surveillance because
suddenly you're like hyper aware of what you're making, and I think that removes like the
genuine earnestness that existed before when you were just like throwing shit together on a plate.
And if you live your life too like in performance, it can be unhelpful and a little stressful.
But maybe the concept of girl dinner will die off quickly now that corporations are taking
notes. Popeye's started selling its own girl dinner promotion consisting of mashed potatoes,
macaroni and cheese, Cajun fries, cole slaw, biscuits, and red beans with rice. Unlike
a traditional combo deal, this promotion consists of side dishes that have to be ordered
individually. The Special Girl Dinner tab is only available on Popeye's website and the price
varies depending on how many sides are ordered. Usually internet aesthetics and trends kind of
enter cringe territory when corporations start getting involved, but there are some trends, most
notably on my algorithm, the blueberry milk nail, that got a ton of backlash right from the start.
So if you're not in the loop with all of that, in early June, Dua Lipa shared a photo of
herself sporting a light blue manicure. Sabrina Carpenter and Sophia Richie Grange posted
shots of themselves wearing similar nail colors as well. Then someone on TikTok coined the term
blueberry milk nails to describe these baby blue manicures. This is not the first time talkers
have aestheticized a simple beauty trend. Past trends have included glazed donut nails, which is
a nude nail with a shimmery coat, and naked nails, which are just unmanicured nails. User, Caitlyn
posted a great video unpacking why blueberry milk nails were the ones to spark mass dissatisfaction
though. She argues that because people recognize that renaming light blue as blueberry milk
is, as she wrote in her TikTok caption, a dumb marketing trick that's too obvious, it's
hard to succumb to the trend. One commenter also suggested that the backlash against blueberry
milk nails could be because people don't like the illusion of choice shattering and being confronted
with the reality that everything is being sold to you in some way or another. But the question I
wanna ask now is how many of these trends are like actual trends? Does the regular person outside of
TikTok even know what blueberry milk nails are? - Whoever said orange is the new
pink was seriously disturbed. - It goes back to the idea that the internet
exists in fragments dictated by algorithms. Blueberry milk nails actually never came up
on my algorithms until I started reading about it through traditional media outlets who were
reporting it. And then once I was reading about it online, suddenly my algorithm put it together
that I am interested in blueberry milk nails, and that's when I started seeing it on my For
You page. So I think traditional media coverage, overblowing the relevance and virality
of certain trends actually leads to those trends becoming more viral and more
relevant. And this has consequences because, you know, as I've talked about in like other
videos, when there's so many trends going on, people like to trend hop and they'll, you
know, they'll buy like a ton of stuff to fit into like the tomato girl trend. And then next
month when tomato girls are no longer a thing, they'll drop all their stuff at the thrift store
and then buy a bunch of new stuff for whatever next trend is happening. Like even with the whole
Barbie consumerism, people have talked about how they're seeing like Barbie merch in thrift stores
already, already. Rebecca Jennings wrote In 2021, Virality treats humans like fast fashion,
algorithmically generated products to shove onto all of our screens at the same time, on
which we then spent enormous sums of money and attention before ending up in the literal and/or
figurative landfill. It isn't just TikTok as Shira Ovide points out in the New York Times.
Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and many other popular sites operate on similar feedback
loops that push more whatever is being noticed, which is how you get phenomenal like sales of
chess sets rising 125% after the release of "The Queen's Gambit" before interest almost immediately
plummeted back down to normal levels. We already live in a world where trends are determined by
algorithms, and we will soon live in a world where even the content is created literally by them.
That's kind of all I have to talk about today. But I am interested in how everyone else has
like interacted with aesthetics as of late, because again, like I've made so many videos on
different like aesthetics that have been cropping up in the culture and sometimes like I look back
and I'm like, was I part of the group of people who are like over-hyping this to be more relevant
than it actually was? Like maybe this aesthetic really only existed in my corner of the internet,
and then because more and more people were talking about it, it became way bigger than it ever was.
At the end of the day. I'm gonna read this one quote because I, while I believe that subcultures
and I do believe aesthetics do serve a purpose, a positive purpose for a lot of people, the over
consumerism part, like that's icky. But I think that there are a lot of like online aesthetics
that are not just based around consumerism. Like I think Cottagecore and Dark Academia for example,
have like a very rich community online that is detached from just overspending. So I think some
online aesthetics can be really positive spaces for people to meet people who have the same style
as them or who have the same kind of interests as them. That being said, I probably don't consider
myself part of like any aesthetic group because, I don't know, I don't like to be limited
in that way. And I think that fashion and style is so fun to play with, and I think if
you claim membership in a type of aesthetic, then there's an expectation that
you have to dress in a certain way every day, which for me is just not, it's just not
for me. I think for a lot of 2020 there was this pressure that you had to participate in
some kind of aesthetic. I think that's gone a little bit away. I think people
still trend hop, but I think that there was a lot of pressure to belong in some sort
of aesthetic community back in 2020 and 2021. And it goes down to the idea that personal
style is not marketable in the same way. I'm gonna read this one quote from this "Vice"
article I read. While it may seem that personal style has gone missing in action, perhaps,
it's worth considering that individual style, no matter how great it might be, might be either
too boring to resonate on social media or that it might be too personal to be picked up
by the algorithm for thousands to see. That was written by Jose Corrales on . Thank you
so much for listening to me talk for this long. I'll be uploading an expanded version of
this on my podcast, so keep your eyes peeled, keep your ears peeled, keep things peeled, keep
your fruit peeled, Tomato Girls everywhere, keep your tomatoes peeled for that release
on Wednesday. But yeah, other than that, I'll see you next time. I hope you have
a lovely rest of your day and bye-bye.
