The 'Vibe Shift' Is Here. 2022 Was Just Beginning.

Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it ... See more

“Just look at the return of indie sleaze,” she says. “This gauche aesthetic is a symptom of our cultural transition from taste to tastelessness. Where pre-pandemic style was defined by the careful curation of cool, young people are now pushing back against refinement by reclaiming the carelessness that comes with being chaotic, tacky and anarchic.”

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

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.

In a sense, this is another manifestation of “Power to the People.” While often viewed through the lens of socio-political or -economic strife, this flock toward the excessive and extravagant is a push against another type of commercialized institutionalism:  wellness .

From seductive night luxe, to innocent kidcore, it’s as

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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

So there’s a weird thing going on where there’s abundance, and yet, at the same time, we’ve become really conservative about our own styles, because people fundamentally don’t want to adopt things that feel inauthentic to them, or will be judged inauthentic.

And because culture is so ephemeral, there’s just more stuff that people are worried that —

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