From brat summer to hot rodent men: why Gen Z love a label

It makes sense that norms are shifting in this direction as Gen Z’s influence spreads. Raised on social media, with access to once illicit bad-taste touchstones like Rocky Horror just a click away, they’ve largely replaced IRL subcultures with a constellation of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K—to be performed, then discarded or demoted t... See more

The proliferation of “-core” style nicknames reminds me of what Kaitlyn Tiffany described as a staple of digital life, dating back to MySpace, Tumblr, and BuzzFeed quizzes: the urge to identify with esoteric aesthetic subcultures such as “cottagecore” and “romantic academia” and “pastel goth” because you want to locate your niche and belong somewhe... See more

Some More Insight Into The Gen Z Coolness Crisis

There are four sort of low-level generational discourses circulating the web right now that I want to try and synthesize into a larger idea. There’s the weird backlash around the word “demure” going viral after a trans TikToker popularized it. There are millennials panicking that Gen Z thinks we all ... See more

The digital obsession with cores—used as a suffix that basically denotes a kind of style—began back in 2013, when the term normcore was first coined by trend forecasters K-Hole as a philosophy of fashion. They posited that the chronically online were competing for virality and uniqueness, and as a result, both were harder to come by. Enter normcore... See more

So the fevered search for the next ever-more-niche revival could be seen as a way for Gen Z to carve out a IYKYK (“if you know, you know”) point of difference and ring-fence a specific look, community or interest. For a limited time, anyway.

A generation’s currency is measured in trends, the moments that make an era mouthwateringly memorable. Only these fads are no longer dictated by a handful of tastemakers. Instead, what gets crowned as cool is often determined by how well a trend appeals to the rhythms of a specific platform. An idea’s artistic or cultural cachet depends on how easi... See more

Gen-Z has inverted the design process — aesthetics like Barbiecore, Cottagecore, Dark Academia and Coastal Grandma originated bottoms-up from social media and resale platform content instead of top-down from fashion brands and retailers. As a result, many Gen-Zers tend to adapt pieces representative of trends into their own personal styles, as opp

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