SurroundedByBooks

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

Text from the article:

"Tomato girl, that girl, clean girl, coconut girl, downtown girl, it girl, soft girl, dark feminine girl, light feminine girl, ballerina girl, coquette girl, cottage core girl, vanilla girl, strawberry girl, party girl, indie sleaze girl, west village girl, east village girl, french girl, italian girl, riviera girl, mermaid girl, rockstar girlfriend, trophy wife, old money girl, new money girl, office siren, pilates girl, yoga girl, beach girl, farmer’s market girl, e-girl, cool girl, weird girl

What was once a fun way to find your niche or like-minded people has now become a part of the cyclical hell now known as the micro trend. These ‘aesthetics’ used to be lasting and instantly recognisable like the more foundational subcultures that came before them, but nowadays we’re really just saying shit. What do you mean you can just order a whole pre-curated style package because a TikTok slideshow told you that you’re like soooo #y2k?A “curated” Y2K TikTok shop package

Now the art of personal style is dying, and we all look the same.

Punk was a response to Thatcherite Britain. Rave culture was a reaction to the Criminal Justice Act. Goth emerged from post-industrial bleakness. These subcultures had music, politics, community; you didn’t buy into them, you lived them. So what on gods green earth is Tomato Girl reacting to? A slow summer and a Pinterest board? What does coquette stand for politically? What is the Guinness moustache 2 dot swap boy rebelling against? Nothing.

We’ve kept the aesthetic shell of subculture and hollowed out everything that made it mean something.

And look, let’s not get too nostalgic about it, we’re not sat here pretending there was ever some golden age where fashion was pure and untouched by money. Malcolm McLaren was selling punk from a shop on King’s Road before half those kids even knew what they were rebelling against. Subculture and commerce have always been in bed together; obviously, that’s not new. The difference is the speed; people used to spend years, genuinely YEARS, developing a look.

Trying things, abandoning them, finding a silhouette that felt like theirs, wearing something until it fell apart. Now you get three weeks before the algorithm decides it’s over, and you’re already behind. It’s not that fashion got commercialised, it’s that the commercialisation got so fast and so all-consuming that there’s no breathing room left to develop an actual point of view before someone’s already packaged it, sold it and moved on.80’S PUNK IMAGE: SHIRLEY BAKERS

“Now the art of personal style is dying, and we all look the same.”

Now, back to my previous list of micro niche TikTok aesthetics or whatever you want to call them. I wonder if you may have noticed a word repeating itself a wee bit. We’re no longer women, we’re now, in fact, perpetually girls. And honestly, I don’t think that’s an accident. A girl is easier to package than a woman, easier to sell back to herself, easier to reduce to a mood board and an Amazon storefront; a girl can be a Pinterest board. But a woman, she has contradictions and weird phases and a jacket she’s had since she was seventeen that doesn’t go with anything, but she’ll never get rid of, and quite frankly, that’s a lot harder to shift units with. The word girl implies youth, softness, the kind of smallness that makes you easy to categorise and easier to market to. Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is exactly the point.

As Rayne Fisher-Quann, aka the Internet Princess, famously stated in her essay “Standing on the Shoulders of Complex Female Characters,”

“It’s become very common online for women to express their identities through an artfully curated list of things they consume or aspire to consume…the aesthetics of consumption have in turn become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable.”

These ‘aesthetics’ previously known as subcultures are now entirely about consumption; it’s no longer about politics and musical taste but more about buying or being perceived as someone who might buy something. For example, the quiet luxury trend was not about actually being rich and being quiet and graceful about it, but in fact, the point was more for people to think that you might be.

And although many would argue, really, there’s no such thing as personal style - cue the cerulean blue scene from The Devil Wears Prada - there’s no denying that across all media, people both facially and in terms of fashion are all starting to look the same, slowly moulding into one big beige lip flip slick back bunned fox eyed blob. Yet to make ourselves seem original, we declare that we’re wearing these items in a different way than the ‘other girls’.

“I’m not wearing Ugg boots in a clean girl way, I’m wearing them in an off-duty ballerina Slavic girl winter way”

Okay, girl, whatever you say. Either way, you’re still following the trend, and these big corporations don’t care whether your shoes are being worn in a basic way or a coquettish way because the money is still going into their pockets.

It’s become a performance of proximity, who got there first, who’s wearing it in the right way or the new way, who is in the know, who started the trend or really gets the trend and who is just a follower, like seriously if I had a quid for everytime I heard or even said myself “but they just don’t GET IT like I do” I would be lying on a beach in Thailand right now.

We speak of those with basic style as less than not for political reasons, or because we want to help the less fashion inclined, but because we want to inflate our own egos, we are better than you because we chose to follow a different trend. Although you may deem it as cooler, a trend is a trend, no matter the outcome.

And it’s not just how we dress, it’s who gets to be in the room. There’s a Reel doing the rounds at the moment that’s said what we’ve all been thinking – stop inviting the same rotating cast of freeloading influencers to everything and bring back actual curation.

Invite the film nerds to the screenings, the fashion nerds to the shows, and the music nerds to the listening parties. Right now, we’ve got people who couldn’t name a single track standing front row at gigs time and again that they got into for free, and will leave before the encore to make sure they get their post up while it’s still relevant. Proximity to a scene is not the same as being part of one. But I suppose when the whole point is just to be seen there, does it even matter if you give a shit what any of it is actually about? Apparently not, babes. Open bar, free food and a branded photobooth? Guess we’ll see you at the next one.

We’ve now reached what people call cultural stagnation. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, whenever the aesthetics become politicised, then fascism is in trend, when it seems like art, beauty and fashion have hit a wall because we keep repackaging the same shit. The average person is no longer developing their aesthetic taste, and nothing feels new because we only seek algorithmic approval, so our taste is intrinsically tied to whatever gives us the most social clout. After being told what is considered to be the pinnacle of beauty, we find ourselves all trying to wear the faces of Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner while trying to achieve the bodies of the likes of Gracie Abrams (convincing women to dedicate all their energy to worrying about their weight is a whole other conversation). And we really do sit and complain about “everybody looks the same” until somebody actually looks different, then we hit them with the “Greek gods would go to war for you/ I love your confidence!” type comment section.

“Stop inviting the same rotating cast of freeloading influencers to everything and bring back actual curation.

Invite the film nerds to the screenings, the fashion nerds to the shows, and the music nerds to the listening parties. Right now, we’ve got people who couldn’t name a single track standing front row at gigs time and again that they got into for free, and will leave before the encore to make sure they get their post up while it’s still relevant. Proximity to a scene is not the same as being part of one. But I suppose when the whole point is just to be seen there, does it even matter if you give a shit what any of it is actually about?”

We buy bags with pre-added charms and jackets that are pre-distressed because the trend cycles go so fast, our clothing doesn’t even get the chance to feel lived in, everything is a signifier and can’t just be worn because it’s loved, but more to show or prove that you are someone. If she wears tabis, she’s a ‘real’ fashion girl; she goes to art galleries and posts fit check TikToks with her photographer boyfriend; if she wears Arcteryx, she’s chill, she drinks Guinness and goes on hikes for the gram. If she wears fur coats, she loves a messy night out, smokes tabs and is let in everywhere, no questions asked, because she knows the band. If she wears Tom’s trunks, she went to private school, loves drum and bass and goes skiing on the weekends.

None of those things have to be true; we just have to believe that they could be. It’s like we’re all desperately trying to make a point about ourselves, and really we’re all just performative asf. And duh, life itself is a performance, but we’ve essentially turned getting dressed into a personality test we administer to ourselves every morning, desperately asking, are we niche enough to be interesting but still hot enough to be desired, weird enough to have taste but not so weird that nobody wants to fuck us?

And when you actually clock what these aesthetics are, they are almost entirely built around a femininity that exists to be perceived. Not felt from the inside but read from the outside, filed correctly, appreciated from a distance. Somewhere along the line, the question stopped being how do I want to feel in my clothes and became will they get it? We absorbed the male gaze so young and so completely that we now curate ourselves for it voluntarily, document it ourselves, post it ourselves, tag the brand ourselves and call it self-expression. And babes, that is not self-expression, that is free advertising.

“Are we niche enough to be interesting but still hot enough to be desired, weird enough to have taste but not so weird that nobody wants to fuck us?”

Gen Z gets blamed for this, but it makes sense when you’ve grown up in an attention economy that demands you be legible at a glance. Personal style used to be the accumulation of a life: a concert tee, a dead relative’s coat, shoes worn down on one side. Now it’s a mood board made real, assembled to be read rather than felt. We’re not getting dressed, we’re making a case for ourselves. We’re at a point now where when we see somebody online showcasing their beautiful individual look, we are no longer inspired to find originality for ourselves, but instead find ourselves in comment sections demanding a step-by-step tutorial on how to copy the entire look.

And before you boys get too comfortable, you’re doing it too. The Salomons hiking boy who’s never been further than the Peaks but owns three shell jackets and needs you to know he could survive a Norwegian winter. The moustache mullet patchwork tattoo guy who keeps his keys on a carabiner, the boy who wears vintage band tees and beat-up Sambas, who’s definitely seen Fontaines D.C. four times and will tell you that every time you play ‘Favourite’. The raw denim enthusiast in full Oni selvedge who’s been to Japan once, visited one workshop in Kojima, and hasn’t stopped talking about it since. The record store guy in a deadstock flannel and New Balance 574s who needs you to know he has the original pressing and absolutely did not find it on Discogs. The “I don’t really follow fashion” boy who somehow owns every single piece from the Uniqlo U drop and is inexplicably head to toe Margaret Howell. The skater boy who hasn’t been on a board since 2019 but exclusively wears Rassvet, Fucking Awesome and one very specific Supreme drop from 2017, he got resale. The “I just threw this on” boy in a perfectly proportioned Rick Owens leather and Lemaire trousers, who, to make it clear, did not ‘just throw it on’.

Men have spent years mocking women for being trend-followers while quietly developing their own just as rigid aesthetic uniforms. The difference is they call it “having taste” rather than following a trend, which is somehow the most on-brand thing imaginable.

Me in 2016: I’m still salty about that

it took me asking three more times before she finally told me she wanted me to leave the fans where they are instead of moving them to my room or something. and I said oh! I had no intention of doing so but thank you for letting me know what the expectation is.

Then he says, “I mean, the problem isn’t the gender thing. The problem is four words: she, her, he, and him. We got rid of stewardess and turned it into flight attendant. It doesn’t matter if the flight attendant is a man or woman, so we got rid of it. We just need to get rid of those. I don’t need to know.”

“You don’t need to know… people’s gender?”

“No. I don’t care, I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to remember it.”