Aesthetic Categorization
Aesthetic Categorization
I follow several thinkers and writers who focus almost exclusively on fashion and branding, in part because their efforts to categorize movements within these spaces are both seemingly impossible (like herding visual cats) and stunningly accurate.
The labels for these movements (“acidgrafix,” “bubblegum bling,” “cottagecore”) are made up and don’t perfectly encapsulate anything (everyone wearing these styles and Instagramming in these ways will straddle multiple aesthetics and differ from others in their genre, at least a little), but they can serve as useful shorthand for pointing at something and orienting a conversation around an emergent visual language (indexing), which I think can be interesting (though also laden with the same inherent downsides of using labels for anything or anyone).
This sort of thing is especially useful for folks working in visuals (art, design, fashion, film, etc) but I think it can be handy to understand that many trends are guided by this sort of thinking, the sorts of folks who come up with these labels advise on (or design) the branding and marketing for entities wanting to monetize these trends, and the whole thing becomes kind of a self-perpetuating spiral of people doing something, that something getting a label, that label attracting interest and money (and money-making potential), more people getting in on it, and then that aesthetic becoming associated with a time period and other things/people/brands before ultimately being replaced (by most of the people enjoying it and the brands utilizing it to reach them) by a new one.
Here’s a solid (and growing) database of aesthetics to explore (click through on one, then check out the gallery to get a sense of what they’re describing): https://cari.institute/aesthetics
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