Over last summer, with plenty free time on my hands due to ill health and very little money to spare, I found myself becoming slowly but surely drawn into the social media cult of aesthetics. As an elder Gen Z, I’d never felt a strong affiliation to either my Millennial predecessors or my Gen Z peers. In that strange in-between space of being permanently and shamefully out of style for either group, I sought a space to belong where I would be deemed acceptable, cool, and current. This began last year in London, when I was mistaken for my sister’s mum. With only two years between us, I was more than embarrassed. It began my headlong leap into reinventing myself, and my trawling of social media to unlock the secrets of how to be cool.

I grew up with a dad who is a punk in every sense of the word, but not in every sense of the style. I was taught that punk ideology is not about looks, but about intentions and actions. And so, I have long been an experimental dresser and overall experimental human. But in doing so in a small town, I found myself struggling to find friendship with people in my age range. It never stopped me from expressing myself freely, but I did feel it like an unwelcome weight in my stomach when I was subtly singled out for being ‘an individual’.

And so, I turned to social media. To TikTok and Pinterest, Instagram and anything else I could download to find out the secret to being ‘in’ with current trends. At first it was fun, like playing dress up and rediscovering myself through a different lens each and every day. But slowly, the want started. The hunger for things which would make me look and feel like one of the in-crowd. The trendy people were telling me that to get glass skin, I needed this product, to be a true downtown girl I had to buy this model of trainer, to be a bookish quirky not-like-other-girls girl, I had to read this book.

I have realised that in my moment of vulnerability, I was drawn into the siren call of the capitalist answer to subculture; the aesthetic.

Subculture is an ideology given human form, the uniform of malcontented youths and outcasts, often a melting pot of cultural exchange and working-class struggles. Aesthetics are a fast-paced trend cycle, gaining momentum over a handful of months before imploding, from the ashes of which the next even better, cooler trend is born, like a phoenix you ordered from Temu.

On reflection, this dangerous slant towards the complete removal of the individual and personal identity through exploration of the self is exactly what big brands and tastemakers want. This month, leopard print is in in a big way, while a few months ago, animal print was filling clothing donation bags, crumpled shamefully amongst all of the other pieces to be condemned to the sorting room at the back of the local charity shop. To be one of the cool kids, you have to own things, to acquire and consume with blinkered gluttony.

In subcultures, the name of your particular group of miscreants was based on how you looked, often pejoratively, and muttered as an insult that you would wear as a badge of honour because you didn’t want to be liked by the people who wouldn’t understand your ideology. In aesthetics, the name and hallmarks of your flavour of trendy comes prepackaged in bows and gingham, chosen for you by a magazine or brand. It is a comfortable, risk-free approach to finding an identity. It’s safe, it’s distracting, and it lines the pockets of the companies creating the trend cycles. 

We live in a Pinterest generation, where visuals are everything, and your thoughts and interests can be purchased at the tap of a thumb. It takes advantage of the vulnerability of those who, like myself, were afraid (however briefly) of being irrelevant. 

I had fun dressing up and playing pretend, but to understand the core of myself and who I am as a person, I have to go back to the basics of what makes me happy, and I know for certain now that that can’t be found trawling the perfectly curated reels, photos and posts of Instagram’s latest darling.