By Charlie Elizabeth Culverhouse
Aesthetics as we know them today, categorised by ‘core’ and ‘girl’ dominated names such as cottagecore, fairycore, warm girl, and soft girl, have always been around in the fashion world. It may seem as though these fenced-in styles popped up in the early 2010s on Tumblr, with soft-grunge and dark academia dominating our overly mature feeds at the time, but these aesthetics predated their online emergence by years if not decades. We just didn’t notice them.
Why? Because they didn’t have names. They weren’t an ‘aesthetic,’ they just…were what they were. Someone stepping out in jeans and a hoodie was not ‘normcore,’ it was just someone stepping out in jeans and a hoodie. These niche aesthetic groups were once simply the personal styles of a small group of trendsetters who were wearing what they wanted to. But now, in the age of social media as we all scramble to artificially build connection and community in the endless online ether, the desire to categorise, name, and put boundaries on a certain look has grown exponentially. Never was this more visible than in the Pinterest Predicts 2024 report that showed users were searching for ‘body moisturiser aesthetic’ instead of just looking for body moisturisers and, in place of looking for hair bows, we have searched for ‘bow aesthetic.’ It seems the aestheticization of, well, everything has just gone too far. So why is it happening?
Warm hues, and subtle palettes have become synonymous with the aesthetic trend
Fashion takes the word aesthetic from the arts world where it’s defined as ‘a set of principles underlying the work of a particular artist or artistic movement.’ The word’s use in fashion is largely the same, defining the set of principles underlying the look of a certain trending style. Cottagecore is defined by its long, floating dresses and ditsy floral prints while 2024's latest emerging style, Eclectic Grandpa, is deemed as such thanks to its love for eccentric pieces and charming, vintage accessories.
However, while the term aesthetic still means largely the same as it always has done, it’s recently begun to lose its authoritative weight, being applied to anything and everything concerning a curated online image.
Case in point? Many of TikTok and Pinterest's current aesthetics are either the same as an existing, named style or they have no look to them at all. We have the ‘warm girl aesthetic’ which is just about people wearing jumpers and gloves as they have coffee and visit an art gallery, while ‘coquette’ has the same look as balletcore. Every feeling, hobby, like, dislike, and personality trait has been turned into an aesthetic for no other reason than to give a name to it, to curate an entire persona around it.
And this is the most obvious reason we’re so drawn in by aesthetic categorisation. In a world of ever-dying trends, where one week you’re cool and the next you’re passe, delving into a single aesthetic and staying there, for a short while at least, provides a simple blueprint for what to wear in an increasingly overwhelming landscape. But this ‘solution’ in itself poses issues. Namely, that aesthetics aren’t always about who we are, but who we want to be.
If you ignore all the obvious issues with overconsumption and sending clothing to landfill, aesthetics themselves promote taking trends to drastic lengths. You can’t like bows, you have to live the coquette lifestyle, practically fetishising yourself, morphing into a character, a persona, to fit into the look’s boxed-in definition. We’re already seeing the downfall of trending items that aim to sell one piece to the masses as they’re replaced with entire trending lifestyles that can ultimately sell you anything from hair accessories to shoes to baking goods or candles. Why sell one thing when you can sell a hundred?
Not only can you sell a tonne of stock thanks to these aesthetics, but you can do so with little effort. TikTok’s desire to label trending looks means it’s doing all the hard work for the companies who want to reach them. As e-commerce agency Limely writes, “GenZ’s dedication to actively labelling themselves is a marketer's dream. For the marketing managers and content creators out there, you can quickly turn your brand into a GenZ-worthy ‘aesthetic’ by labelling it as ‘_core’ and jumping on the trending core aesthetics.” It’s as simple as that.
Our approach to aesthetics now is completely backwards when compared with the aesthetic’s predecessor, subcultures. Subcultures used to be a largely one-and-done thing. You hit your teenage years, fell in love with punk music, bought some Doc Martens to match with your favourite artists, and then you were a punk. Forever. Or you got your first paycheck, bought a mini skirt or some Fred Perry because you loved it, and then you were a Mod. Again, forever. The difference between subcultures and today’s aesthetics is the subcultures weren’t curated from the outset, they were defined over years and years of separate people developing personal styles, personal tastes and interests, and then realising they collectively enjoyed the same things. For a subculture to develop, there has to be a history behind it. But today, aesthetics are defined, bought into, and then tossed aside as soon as some other new, more enticing personality is proposed and a whole range of clothing is subsequently developed to fit into it. As journalist Yomi Adegoke wrote in a 2021 British Vogue article, “If video killed the radio star, then it was the internet that killed subcultures.”
But it’s not all bad. Aesthetics, no matter how much discourse surrounds them, are largely fun, interesting ways to experiment with fashion and it is the minority who tend to take them too far to sell products, overconsume fashion, and brand themselves online for likes. But it is important to note the backwards way we’re approaching aesthetics so we can refocus our approach to them. Body moisturiser is not an aesthetic, neither are bows. These are things you like and can like independently of anything else. We just can’t seem to wait for things to be categorised and curated. Let’s just let go and like what we like.
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