The Gen Z Aesthetic

Whereas the millennial women of Instagram — the millennial women associated with the “that-girl” trope — would strike the perfect pose and use filters to enhance their natural beauty, Gen-Zs use their phone cameras to distort the natural ideal of the human face, obscuring their features with emojis, cartoon glitter, surreal lighting and other disto... See more

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

K-HOLE and Box1824 captured the new landscape in their breakthrough 2014 report “Youth Mode.” They described an era of “mass indie” where the search for meaning is premised on differentiation and uniqueness, and proposed a solution in “Normcore.” Humorously, nearly everyone mistook Normcore for being about bland fashion choices rather than the grea... See more