I recently embarked on a quixotic online quest: to finally figure out my aesthetic.
I went to the source, TikTok, which has many ways to help, including suggesting I search the phrase “What Aesthetic Are You?” In doing so I found many videos, all of which were algorithmically tailored to answer a question such as mine. Some provided me with a slideshow, set to music, of all the different options (do black and glitter catch my eye? Star girl. Or pink and bright colors? Preppy). Others provided me with other means to suss out what I am. “Ask your friend what style you give off,” suggested one. Another even had a magazine style quiz. (There are five rounds, the video instructs. Keep track of the letters you choose; at the end, see which you have the most of.)
Truth is, I am in a bit of an online identity crisis. I don’t know what I am; it changes with the seasons and my mood. Vanilla girl was appealing in January, but now that the weather warms up, I’m leaning coastal grandmother. Sometimes I am Barbie-core in a pair of fuchsia pants; other days I only wear white and tan like a clean girl. I just had a baby; am I in my mom era? If so, am I a hot mom? Eh. A rich mom? (Lol, no). A hippie mom? Nah.
We are truly in the age of aesthetics. Every other week, a new aesthetic—encapsulated in a specific term that describes a lifestyle, personal style, mood, and in some cases identity—seems to be trending.
Users on TikTok, especially young people, have been placing labels on subgroups they identify with since the early days of the app. One person would identify a trend or aesthetic, post about it, and suddenly it was everywhere. First, there were VSCO girls, the sweet yet cool teens whose love of scrunchies and Hydroflasks, shared through the VSCO photo editing app, made them a meme. Simultaneously there were their edgier counterparts, e-girls and e-boys, noted for their “Hot Topic but elevated” style and, for the girls, small drawings of hearts near their eyes.
Since the pandemic, though, the proliferation of aesthetics has exploded. Now everyone can find their niche online. It’s almost disconcertingly easy to sort yourself into a box. Do you aspire to one day live on a farm, baking your own sourdough? Then you are definitely cottagecore, and here’s how you need to act, what you should buy, and what you’re expected to post on social media. Do you like Pilates and the color pink? Then you are, for sure, a Pink Pilates princess, so buy a matching workout set (pink), a yoga mat (also pink), and commit to getting up at 7 a.m. to do hip bridges on said mat before work. Then, drink a green juice.
Once they’ve chosen, many go all in. I’ve been fascinated by how many young women and teenagers I’ve come across whose social media accounts—and one must assume, at least part of their actual lives—are almost exclusively devoted to the aesthetic they have chosen. Y2K-style influencers don’t just dress like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton; they truly identify with the early 2000s spirit the outfits evoke. Women who call themselves cinnamon girls don’t just love dark moody colors, journaling, and Lana Del Rey; they feel the deep feelings the aesthetic makes a core characteristic. For some clean girls, their aesthetic has even made them appreciate their womanhood, because it’s part of the trend. In one #cleangirlaesthetic video, a woman shows herself making a pink-colored drink, plus her makeup, her color-coordinated notebooks, and her pink workout set.
“I’m just a girl,” she captioned it, hashtagging #ilovebeingawoman.
As you flip through TikTok, the different aesthetics flash by in a whirl of products and vibes. But underneath the surface, there seems to be a deep yearning, a craving that, if you listen, the women posting these videos are practically screaming out: Who should I be?
The videos are certainly resonating. One simple slideshow video aimed at helping you “choose your aesthetic” from March has more than 17.9 million views and more than 250,000 comments, mostly from users tagging their friends, pleading with them to help them choose. “WHAT AM I,” one wrote.
Viewing this from a perhaps cynical millennial lens, it’s easy to start speculating on the core yearning behind the almost regimented way so many women, many of them young, keep placing themselves into neat boxes. The box can change, you can hop from one to another, but it’s still a box while you’re in it. Why does one need to claim an aesthetic at all? Is this all a play for social media virility, or is it deeper?
The women and girls who are all in on an aesthetic are, it seems, getting validation from it. I stumbled upon one account from a woman who has dedicated herself to the #CoquetteGirlAesthetic, which, according to , is “about embracing and indulging in all things romantic and beautiful” (it’s also marked by a devotion to, you guessed it, Lana del Rey). Kellen Beckett, @coqxette, calls herself the Coquette Big Sis and counsels her nearly 400,000 followers how to follow her lead in dedicating themselves to the aesthetic. In one recent video, she provides tips for a perfect coquette spring outfit (florals are key, cardigan if it gets chilly, Mary Janes are a “coquette staple and perfect for spring”).
“I have a dress with tiny butterflies on it and it’s also white, is that also okay?” asked one commenter. “Yes anything is ok…I bet that dress is gorgeous,” the creator responded.
Wanting to fit in or label yourself isn’t a new concept. Just look at every high school movie of the past 50 years, notes Michael Spicher, PhD, a philosopher who runs the Aesthetics Research Lab, which studies how “aesthetics influences everyday decisions and actions” in society.
“I haven’t been in high school in a really long time, but you’d be identified in these different groups,” he tells me. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re a jock,’ ‘you’re a prep.’”
That yearning to be labeled and placed in a neat box hasn’t changed for teenagers, he muses; perhaps it has just evolved. That this became so prevalent among young people while many of them were forced to miss high school and college because of COVID-19, spending some of their most formative years social distancing, doesn’t feel like a coincidence.
“This is something that I think they can control,” Dr. Spicher speculates. “After what the world just went through in the last few years, I think people are looking for that more than ever, looking for some kind of way to control their lives. And this is one of those things that they can do.”
He may be onto something, Olivia Layne, a TikTok creator and self-described “elder Gen Z” tells me. Layne, who has more than 216,000 followers on her pop-culture-themed account, has watched the proliferation of aesthetics on the platform with curiosity and amusement. It may very well be, she says, that young women are seeking connection after the past few years.
“I think maybe they’re trying to find community with others, and the way they’re doing that is by grouping themselves by what they like and by how they dress,” she says.
There are other factors, she thinks. Many young people grew up in the age of Tumblr and stan Twitter, where “a big part of it is curating a vibe and curating an identity around the things you like,” she says. “So I think now we’re seeing that expand on TikTok, where it’s not just about you liking Lana del Rey, it’s ‘now you like Lana del Rey and you dress in coquette-ish aesthetic.’ People want to curate little identities for the things that they like.”
As more and more aesthetics emerge, though, Layne has grown a bit uncomfortable about who they are appealing to, and who they are leaving out.
“What is the clean girl aesthetic? Because you’re showing pictures of Hailey Bieber as if that’s the standard that we should all be for this aesthetic that you think is the best,” she says. “And it’s like, everyone doesn’t look like Hailey Bieber.”
In a video she made in January, Layne pointed out the similarities between the clean girl aesthetic, the vanilla girl aesthetic, and the that-girl aesthetic. Mainly, they are all pretty exclusionary.
“I think when you get down to what these aesthetics are and the similarities between all of them, at the end of the day, a lot of them do boil down to being thin and white and pretty. That’s the vibe, and that’s the aesthetic,” she tells me. “And so I do think it’s a valid criticism that people are questioning, like, ‘What do these aesthetics mean?’”
She adds, “It seems like some of y’all are just very enamored by just thinness and whiteness and this perceived wealth.”
It’s the clean girl aesthetic in particular which has led many both on the app and off to look more closely at what these aesthetics are trying to say. The use of the word clean to denote someone who looks like Hailey Bieber seems racially coded, with one creator saying, “Does this mean any other girl who doesn’t fit that description is dirty?” Other creators have pointed out that many elements of the style, such as slicked-back hair and gold jewelry, were done by women of color first.
“Deinfluencing the clean girl aesthetic. Let’s pay homage to the black and brown people that got made fun of for it years ago and then it got adopted because yt people made it trendy,” wrote one.
The issues with aesthetic devotion can also be more existential. Gia, a high school senior in Chicago, got more than 2.1 million views on a video she posted in October in which she said she’s concerned about her generation and their fixation on aesthetics. She worries this focus on hyper-compartmentalized empty identities is hindering their self-actualization.
“People take it to such a drastic extent that it’s as if they almost fetishize themselves as this character to the point where they start subconsciously molding themselves as this persona, even if it clashes with what they really want,” she said in the video.
She blames, what else, the social media platforms, telling me that TikTok creates echo chambers where if you like, say, the old-money aesthetic, it will just keep feeding you more and more similar content. That may seem harmless on its face, but what if you are into soft-girl aesthetic, which covets an “easy life”? Or fetishize the trad-wife aesthetic, which idealizes a patriarchal society? This is a slippery slope.
“It’s a very slow spiral, but if you’re exposed to it enough, which is the way these apps work…the more you spiral into a more radicalized sense of this label,” she says.
Gia once had an aesthetic she claimed: the man-eater aesthetic, which idolizes “femmes fatales.” But then she found herself “suppressing my genuine feelings towards men,” because it didn’t fit her “character.” She worries other young women are staying in these boxes, in TikTok feedback loops, and not exposing themselves to other people and ideas.
“This echo chamber fosters comfort, and you cannot grow in comfort. If you really want to grow as a person and really kind of meld and create your own identity that’s authentic to you and feels right to you, you have to break out of people that are just mirrors and reflections of you,” she says. “You have to understand different perspectives. You have to broaden your horizons.”
Playing with identity and belonging online, like buying only pink or having a certain type of clothing, may create a sense of belonging, but it’s important not to get lost your aesthetic. After all, no one is just one thing; the best thing to be is an amalgamation of many different aesthetics, and to be constantly learning and growing. It’s what young women like Gia are starting to focus on—not on which aesthetic they are, but on who they are.
Gia now identifies with a radical new aesthetic: no aesthetic at all. She is just herself. Maybe you can call it Gia-core.
“I don’t like to think of myself as clothing, or a look or a label, but fluid,” she says. “I’m always evolving, and if I confine myself to a style, I’m confining my authenticity and what I have the potential to be, you know?”
