Have TikTok Aesthetics Replaced Subcultures?
And if they did... is that a bad thing?
Culture commentators love to argue that kids these days are too concerned with “aesthetics” to the exclusion of anything else. To their mind, everything has been subsumed by the almighty Aesthetic: films, music, politics, personalities, and, most recently, subcultures.
The kids have been bodysnatched by vibes.
In this context, aesthetics means something different from how you might be used to hearing the word. When the Social Critic wage war against Zoomer and Gen Alpha's “aesthetics,” they’re essentially referring to a mood board with a hashtag: a collection of visuals given a hyper-specific name. Examples of aesthetics range from the niche and ephemeral, like #tomatogirl, to some you may have even heard of before, like #barbiecore, #coquette, #darkacademia, and #cottagecore.
When someone writes about “aesthetics,” they do not refer to the traditional philosophical understanding of the word, which deals with the nature of beauty, art, and taste and the creation and appreciation of beauty. The word also isn’t used as a slightly more pretentious stand-in for “looks” or the overall feeling of a place or fashion trend, i.e., a minimalist or maximalist aesthetic.
So, what’s the argument against this fixation with aesthetics? It’s a sign that culture is consumed passively and, crucially, shallowly. To have a culture-wide obsession with “aesthetics” indicates a culture that’s fixated on collecting, curating, and buying. Young people aren’t engaging with culture on a level that’s any more challenging than buying items that meet particular criteria or, worse, saving images that meet specific criteria, posting them online, and affixing a label to them. This description of youth culture is hardly distinguishable from the machine-like process of semantic tagging, the process of assigning tags or labels that capture the meaning or context of the content, often used in processing natural language.
In the New York Times, Mireille Silcoff writes in the latest screed against aesthetics, “What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing.”
My problem with this argument isn't that the internet doesn't constantly generate a cornucopia of aesthetics, both genuine and fabricated, by journalists looking to kickstart the latest trend. Rather, my issue lies with the notion that "micro-trends" are a novel concept or that they have replaced individual tastes, personalities, or subcultures, which simply isn't the case. The idea that your teenage or pre-teen daughter adopts a new persona every week because of a trending hashtag on TikTok is absurd.
If it feels like a cop-out to say micro-trends, particularly in the context of fashion, have been around for hundreds of years (they have), then let’s stick to the way these things manifest on social media.
A Non-Exhaustive History of Social Media Micro-trends
In the 2010s, journalists began to notice the granular labeling practices deployed by Tumblr and Pinterest users, e.g., soft grunge, pale goth, seapunk. Sometimes the label would include a “-wave,” like vaporwave, or a “-core,” like traumacore. Users referred to these little blips on the radar as “aesthetics,” and outsiders would occasionally mistake them as “subcultures.” As some naming conventions suggest, they didn’t only manifest as “aesthetics,” either; there was also often a musical component, as micro-genres seemed as plentiful as new aesthetic categories did at that time.
It would be nearly impossible to figure out why and how this happened outside of a robust oral history project, but I have a few ideas.
It was likely inspired by English-language users interested in Japanese “kei.” The easiest way to think of kei is it’s similar to how we might use “core,” or “wave.”
In the context of Japanese fashion (J-fashion), the term “kei” refers to a variety of subcultural styles, each with its unique characteristics and history. The word "kei" itself means "style" or "system" in Japanese, and it's used as a suffix to denote different fashion movements within Japan. These styles are not only about clothing but also encompass hairstyles, makeup, and lifestyle choices that supposedly reflect an individual’s identity. And each one has dozens of substyles, too. There are hundreds of “kei,” and within each “kei,” dozens of more specific labels.
So, J-fashion lays some of the groundwork here.
When you look at early Tumblr aesthetic moodboards, they often take cues from Japanese images, and that’s probably why the connection is there. Fairy-kei, a cutesy, pastel-heavy style, used to dominate Tumblr moodboards. As more people create their mood boards, the style evolves, and you get things like pastel goth or the more obscure morute, a portmanteau of morbid and cute.
Now, the labeling conventions on Tumblr didn’t always make sense.
That is, sometimes it felt like people were pulling labels out of their asses—divining aesthetics, or worse, when discovered by journalists, “trends,” out of nothing. Occasionally, there was no reason to give something a new label other than differentiation for differentiation’s sake. This was so well-known that it was even a self-conscious joke for some users. All this to say, TikTok didn’t “invent” this proclivity towards labeling in any meaningful sense. And neither did Tumblr, for that matter. It was such a common practice that it would even be a mistake to say that the key differentiator is that today’s journalists just use it as story fodder. They were doing it in the early 2010s, too.
The Aesthetic as Your Personality (or Subculture)
History aside, the question remains if culture has become so flat and so fragmented that adopting the aesthetic of the week has replaced subcultures or, more damning, individual personalities.
No.
This wasn’t true on Tumblr, and it’s not true today. It might be true that there are broader umbrella terms you can sort aesthetics under that may mirror a subculture (e.g., coquette has inspired several substyles, but they all fall under the same heading of coquette). Still, the idea that both personality and subculture were ‘replaced’ with these fleeting terms is absurd. If anything, the tendency to be interested in these micro-trends constitutes a subculture in and of itself. Each emergent label, however, does not.
As for where subcultures have gone?
There are two potential answers.
One is that we undervalue the types of existing subcultures: subcultures built around media properties (fandoms) and digitally native subcultures. Just because they’re online doesn’t mean they’re not real or don’t behave the way offline subcultures do. It doesn’t even mean they’re not performed in the physical world—often, they are.
There are prominent examples, like Swifties (fans of Taylor Swift), anime fans (weeaboos), neo-pagans, or furries, but there are also less popular ones. For example, several popular podcasts have inspired discrete subcultures. Fans of each program meet in person; they have designated online meeting places, and they have unique tastes, styles, and even slang that allows people ‘in-the-know’ to identify them without declaring that they listen to whatever program.
The same applies to several online personalities… I mean, just look at Bronze Age Pervert (BAP). The BAPosphere is a subculture. So are Groypers, the subculture that formed around Nick Fuentes.
Although fandom is nothing new, we still think of fandoms as somehow superficial or less meaningful. Part of that conception of fandom being somehow shallow is the overly romanticized view that the subcultures of yore, like goth or punk or grunge, offered more.
We might also undervalue them because it’s not always immediately apparent who’s a member, especially in the offline world. Or it might be because we have a preconceived notion of what a subculture is. We remember people dressing in a particular way or having a specific haircut, and newer expressions of subculture might mean you have a specific Discord or X avatar instead.
The second answer is that some kids—unfortunately, probably more than ever before—are just isolated.
It’s not that subcultures don’t exist; the rot has become so bad that some young people don’t know how to identify them.
Millennials experienced a version of this, too. When I was younger, I longed to be born in the 80s so I could meet real-life, in-the-flesh mall goths instead of just looking at pictures of goth fashion online. Little did I know that in 2009, there were goths in my South Florida hometown. I just didn’t drive, so I didn’t know where they hung out. It was as simple as: I thought they didn’t exist because I couldn’t find them and I couldn’t find them because I didn’t know where to look.
It wasn’t until I moved to a city with better public transportation that I realized goths existed the whole time. I hadn’t interacted with them in the real world until then. (The flipside, though, is that while we bemoan the loss of “third places,” or even, say, concert venues, there’s a good argument to be made that the Internet is a place. And the evolution of subcultures can happen just as easily in a Discord server as they can at a DIY venue.)
What about the Algorithm?
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Algorithm, which often feels like it’s personified as something of a demi-god. While algorithms play a significant role in curating content and shaping users' online experiences, this isn’t totally new, either. That is, sure, it matters, but the past wasn’t quite as organic as we like to think it was.
Historically, subcultures have had a complex and symbiotic relationship with the media.
Subcultures have often relied on media coverage to gain visibility and attract new members, while the media has capitalized on the novelty and sensationalism of emerging subcultures to capture audiences' attention. For example, punk gained notoriety through sensationalized media coverage, simultaneously popularizing and diluting its anti-establishment message.
Similarly, grunge in the 1990s was propelled into the mainstream through extensive media exposure. MTV played a significant role in promoting grunge music and fashion. However, this media attention also led to the commodification of grunge (and punk and goth and today, incels and everything else online), with major fashion brands and retailers co-opting its distinctive style… rinse and repeat.
The role of algorithms in shaping the visibility of subcultures and micro-trends on social media platforms extends this relationship between media and subcultures. Just as the press and television had the power to amplify or suppress certain subcultures in the past, algorithms now can determine which aesthetics and trends are given prominence on social media feeds.
But also—algorithms aren’t all-powerful, as much as we’d like to think they are, and their influence is not absolute. While they may shape the content that users are exposed to, they do not necessarily dictate individuals' authentic interests and desires within subcultures.
The media, including social media, can still be subverted… and luckily for the kids, it still is.
One thing I notice is that online aesthetics tend to be pretty separate from experience. If someone goes full cottagecore and actually lives on a farm, then it doesn't seem like most people are bothered by that. On the other hand, I remember those tumblr soft grunge pictures where there were photographs of parties with black balloons floated to the ceiling and people lighting roses on fire. But, what even were these parties? How many soft grunge parties actually happened?
Aesthetics come from a snapshot of sensory reality. Or they come from an abstract representative of reality that can express lived experience better than a literal representation. In that sense, some Internet subcultures are just trying to express the strange, cerebral nature of Internet experience, which can be pretty interesting. But trying to express an embodied culture, like living on the prairie, without engaging with it, will probably always feel kind of aesthetically hollow.
I spent one evening binging the entirety of every -core and -punk label on the Aesthetics wiki, so I understand the sentiment here. I think you’re directionally on to something, but I think “replacing subcultures” is a bit too strong of a thesis; it seems to me that aesthetics are sub-subcultures, or maybe ‘nanocultures’ if you want a trendy word.