The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI) is an online community which is "dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera from the 1970s until now". [1] [2] [3] [4]
In the early 2010s, Evan Collins participated in the online vaporwave scene largely through r/vaporwave and in some groups on Facebook. He found that the vaporwave scene didn't explore the late 1990s and early 2000s as much as the 1980s to mid-1990s. In August 2014, he watched the music video for "Out of Your Mind" by Victoria Beckham and realized the prevalence of futuristic looks during that era. Inspired by the video, he made a collage on Photoshop to get a define the millennium/Y2K aesthetic and posted it to the vaporwave subreddit. The post received interest with people asking for more examples. This resulted in him finding around 900 examples and putting them in an album on Imgur in October 2014. He continued to collect examples in all fields including art, music, fashion, architecture, and industrial design, striving for a complete documented understanding of the era. [5]
In 2019, Collins delivered the first presentation on CARI at the Seattle Design Festival. [6]
Frutiger is a series of typefaces named after its Swiss designer, Adrian Frutiger. Frutiger is a humanist sans-serif typeface, intended to be clear and highly legible at a distance or at small text sizes. A popular design worldwide, type designer Steve Matteson described its structure as "the best choice for legibility in pretty much any situation" at small text sizes, while Erik Spiekermann named it as "the best general typeface ever".
A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs are typically used to make something new feel familiar in an effort to speed understanding and acclimation. They employ elements that, while essential to the original object, serve no pragmatic purpose in the new system. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.
Windows Aero is the design language introduced in the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. The changes introduced by Windows Aero encompassed many elements of the Windows interface, with the introduction of a new visual style with an emphasis on animation, glass, and translucency; interface guidelines for phrasing and tone of instructions and other text in applications were available. New cursors and sounds based on Windows Aero design principles were also introduced.
Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music and a subgenre of hauntology, a visual art style, and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s, and became well-known in 2015. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, 1970s elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, stylized Ancient Greek or Roman sculptures, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.
Soft grunge was a fashion trend that originated on Tumblr around the late 2000s and early 2010s. Beginning as an outgrowth of the 2000s indie sleaze fashion trend but with a greater influence from the 1990s, particularly grunge fashion, the style began as a reaction against the glamor fitness culture which was dominant in popular culture at the time. It is characterized by its merger of cute and aggressive fashion hallmarks like chokers, tennis skirts, leather jackets and boots, flower crowns, distressed denim and pastel colors. Soft grunge reached its peak popularity around 2014, by which time it had been embraced by high fashion designers including Hedi Slimane and Jeremy Scott and been worn by celebrities including Charli XCX. Its internet-based merger of subculture, fashion and music made it one of the earliest examples of an internet aesthetic. In the early 2020s, the style experienced a minor resurgence due to videos posted on the video sharing application TikTok.
Femboy is a slang term that refers to males, usually cisgender, who express themselves with traditionally feminine behaviours, or—especially in the variant spelling femboi—to LGBTQ people of any gender identity who affect a "soft" masculine look. As an Internet aesthetic, this may be through the use of jewellery, wearing feminine clothing and makeup, or expressing feminine behavioural qualities. Femboy can be used as both a sexual and non-sexual term; it does not denote a specific sexual orientation or gender role.
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese and Hong Kong counterpart is Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from three seconds to 60 minutes. It can be accessed with a smart phone app.
Sovietwave is a subgenre of synthwave music and accompanying Internet aesthetic which originates from the former Soviet Union, primarily Russia. It is characterized by an emphasis on the technology and culture of the Soviet Union, such as the Soviet space program and retrofuturistic Soviet era architecture and art, and is an expression of nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Linguist Maria Engström described Sovietwave as the post-Soviet counterpart to vaporwave, evoking a similar nostalgic critique of the "contemporary collapse of futurity" and longing for the lost optimism of a bygone era.
E-kids, split by binary gender as e-girls and e-boys, are a youth subculture of Gen Z that emerged in the late 2010s, notably popularized by the video-sharing application TikTok. It is an evolution of emo, scene and mall goth fashion combined with Japanese and Korean street fashion.
Cottagecore is an internet aesthetic idealising rural life. Originally based on a rural European life, it was developed throughout the 2010s and was first named cottagecore on Tumblr in 2018. The aesthetic centres on traditional rural clothing, interior design, and crafts such as drawing, baking, and pottery, and is related to similar aesthetic movements such as grandmacore, goblincore, gnomecore, and fairycore.
Dark academia is an internet aesthetic and subculture concerned with higher education, the arts, and literature, or an idealised version thereof. The aesthetic centres on traditional educational clothing, interior design, activities such as writing and poetry, ancient art, and classic literature, as well as classical Greek and Collegiate Gothic architecture. The trend emerged on social media site Tumblr in 2015, before being popularised by adolescents and young adults in the late 2010s and early 2020s, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The fashions of the 2020s represent a departure from 2010s fashion and feature a nostalgia for older aesthetics. They have been largely inspired by styles of the late 1990s to mid-2000s, and 1980s. Early in the decade, several publications noted the shortened trend and nostalgia cycle in 2020s fashion. Fashion was also shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a major impact on the fashion industry, and led to shifting retail and consumer trends.
TikTok food trends are specific food recipes and food-related fads on the social media platform TikTok. This content amassed popularity in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many people cooked and ate at home and more people turned to social media for entertainment. While some TikTok users share their diets and recipes, others expand their brand or image on TikTok through step-by-step videos of easy and popular recipes. Users often refer to food-related content as "FoodTok."
Indie sleaze was a fashion style popular in the United States and United Kingdom from approximately 2006 to 2012. Characterised by an affordable, messy and lethargic take on vintage fashion styles, especially the 1970s, the style was particularly popular amongst the hipster subculture and indie rock bands.
Hyram Yarbro is an American skin care influencer known for his videos on YouTube and TikTok. His videos consists primarily of product reviews, skin care advice, and reactions to celebrity skin care routine videos. In 2021, he launched his skin care product line, Selfless by Hyram, with Sephora.
An Internet aesthetic, also simply referred to as an aesthetic or microaesthetic, is a visual art style, sometimes accompanied by a fashion style, subculture, or music genre, that usually originates from the Internet or is popularized on it. Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, online aesthetics gained increasing popularity, specifically on social media platforms such as Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok, and often were used by people to express their individuality and creativity. They can also be used to create a sense of community and belonging among people who share the same interests. The term aesthetic has been described as being "totally divorced from its academic origins", and is commonly used as an adjective.
Aliyah Bah, known professionally as Aliyah's Interlude, is an American influencer and musician. After starting her TikTok account in 2020, she became popular on the platform in 2022 for her fashion aesthetic, which became known as AliyahCore online. Her debut single, "It Girl", was released in 2023 and went viral on TikTok.
Coquette aesthetic is a 2020s fashion trend that is characterized by a mix of sweet, romantic, and sometimes playful elements and focuses on femininity through the use of clothes with lace, flounces, pastel colors, and bows, often draws inspiration from historical periods like the Victorian era and the 1950s, with a modern twist.
Frutiger Aero, sometimes known as Web 2.0 Gloss, is a retrospective name applied to a design trend observed mainly in user interfaces and Internet aesthetics from the 2000s, before declining in popularity during the 2010s. The term Frutiger Aero is derived from Windows Aero, which exemplifies the style, and Adrian Frutiger, a Swiss typeface designer who was responsible for many of the humanist typefaces that were often used in older computing interfaces.
Y2K is an internet aesthetic based around products, styles, and fashion of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The name Y2K comes from an abbreviation created by programmer David Eddy for the year 2000 and its potential computer errors. The Y2K aesthetic can include synthetic or metallic materials, inflatable furniture, computer interfaces of the dotcom era, and parts of the McBling aesthetic.