cottagecore and other internet aesthetics

I too am unsure what the hell is being discussed.

did you ever have a tea party with your stuffed animals?

congratulations, you're a Nazi

Ah, fuck.

I feel like one distinction being inconsistently drawn itt is that which exists between appreciation for an aesthetic and fetishization of an aesthetic.

isn't it the fetish that makes it an aesthetic at all

Perhaps. How would you define the fetish?

circularly, as the kind of relation that makes it an aesthetic

what is this about again

xxxp ha thanks gyac that looks great - will enjoy getting up to speed

absolutely didn’t know what to expect when I hit the link and was thinking it might be this one!

In a lot of contexts you just say "fetischization" to signify that a person's appreciation for an aesthetic is suspect.

These internet aesthetics seem to me like a reclamation of the idea of youth sub-cultures.
Gen X teens were especially concerned with tribal notions of fashion and music cliques and whether you were a punk, a skin, a metalhead, a mod etc. People wore their affiliations like a badge of pride and could get quite territorial about whether something was proper goth or not etc.

That seemed to fade out a bit for millennials who had a world of internet to draw from, and soon the idea of just listening to one style of music and dressing in a way that reflected it seemed quaint. Much cooler to be into everything, to treat yourself to helpings of pop AND metal AND hip hop AND indie. It wasn't always immediately apparent what kind of music someone was into just by looking at the clothes they wore. It became vogueish to fuck with people's expectations: US indie bands talking-up how much they appreciated Norwegian black metal; metal bands eschewing leather jackets for cardigans; and of course the critical reappraisal of commercial pop music throughout the late-90s/early-00s, meant the floodgates were open for people to embrace eclecticism, to pick and choose from everything art and culture had to offer.

So my guess is that these aesthetics are a best-of-both-worlds. It's about creating and drawing inspiration from these micro-subcultures which can be selected from on a day-to-day basis. A zoomer could dress as a harried university librarian one day, get a strange pang of nostalgia from a laundry basket the next, be fawning over adorable picturesque English cottages another day, getting inspired by unfashionable clothes from ten years ago, or getting really into a certain hue of magenta etc.

It's like choosing songs for a playlist or making a bespoke DJ mix that extends beyond music into a whole vibe: observing one's physical and emotional world and mixing and matching various elements so they fit together and make sense. But unlike the Gen X subcultures, it's ephemeral; it's a type of cosplay, and like emsworth says, there's a certain level of self-awareness going on here. There's no pressure to affiliate yourself to that particular mode for very long - "I'm feeling very cottagecore today" is something I could imagine someone saying with a smidge of self-deprecating irony.

I mean, I'm not saying this is entirely new. I can imagine fashion designers and other creative workers have been thinking about and analysing the world around them in this way for a very long time, but this feels very much more grassroots and youth-driven

Spotify made an official playlist inspired by the "Dark Academia" internet micro-aesthetic.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX17GkScaAekA

A study playlist! No less. Chopin, Satie, Tchaikovsky join the ranks of Caiio, cxlt. and all your other favorite psuedonymous crafters of vibes.

I do hate it when people their to damnedest to discourage you from enjoying good music!

try their damnedest even!

to them i recommend the "chaotic academia" aesthetic https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Chaotic_Academia

wait is this a joke?

once i was in a coffee shop and a very tall and handsome man sat down with a brand new copy of "anti-oedipus." he glanced at the back of the book, stood up, looked around, then sat back down. then he cracked it open, seemed to read it for like eight seconds and then closed it with a sort of shudder. he was tapping his foot at his point and his eyes were darting wildly, suspiciously around the coffee shop. this is chaotic academia in action it is rhizomic.

All vaporwave is fascist.

how did that happen? originally it was like a marxist/"hauntalogical" aesthetic.

here's an aesthetic for you

🤮

Are the manic street preachers "bibliopunk"?

Not sure if this has already been linked, but thought this was an excellent exploration of internet aesthetics and "vibe capitalism"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-and-the-vibes-revival

Anecdotally, I've found that instagram ads are much more persuasive in getting me to buy things than any other channel - I guess when yr vibescrolling through the grid, you're infinitely more suggestible to buying a houseplant subscription/new pair of yogis/a ridic expensive swedish raincoat/whateves? Since deleting the app and only accessing insta via firefox packed with adblockers, it's a notably different experience...

agreed - instagram seems to have me absolutely nailed and i hate it

Thirded. I have no need for some Japanese cat jogging pants but I still follow the Instagram link

once i was in a coffee shop and a very tall and handsome man sat down with a brand new copy of "anti-oedipus." he glanced at the back of the book, stood up, looked around, then sat back down. then he cracked it open, seemed to read it for like eight seconds and then closed it with a sort of shudder. he was tapping his foot at his point and his eyes were darting wildly, suspiciously around the coffee shop. this is chaotic academia in action it is rhizomic.

― treeship., Sunday, May 23, 2021 2:54 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

This man's thinking was too arborescent

What are some current aesthetics you enjoy?

I don't entirely mean this in the cottagecore/dark academia sense of the term, though it can be that, too. It's more that as I get older* I find it easy to pinpoint aesthetic trends I dislike - slowed down pop song trailer music, the way every cartoon show tends to look now, Corporate Memphis - but harder to find ones I enjoy.

This has also been brought home to me by how much I enjoyed films like The Souvenir, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and Licorice Pizza purely as fetishistic evocations of their periods, which tbf I didn't even grow up in. Which is a trend in and of itself ofc, but I don't want to start a discussion about nostalgia, it's more I would enjoy getting a similar aesthetic charge out of something looking entirely now, tho I understand that this will never happen as tidily for a time that you're actually in.

Important bit for me here is I'm looking for aesthetic trends rather than specific artists, works or even, in the case of music, genres.

* yes I get the irony of asking this on a forum where I'm probably in the younger half of posters

It's always in danger of being too retro for me but I very much like the revival of juicy colored lighting (pioneered by italian horror films) in Refn's films, Color Out Of Space, We Are The Flesh, Bliss, Mandy and many more. I'd like to see more experimentation and evolution of it though.

And I like the ragged messy style of some new-ish comic artists

Yeah I think bisexual lighting is an aesthetic I enjoy.

Which comic artists are you thinking of? I've been watching a lot of Cartoonist Kayfabe and getting more and more into the art of comics (as opposed to writing) and there as well all my fave aesthetics seem to be ancient.

I like to make playlists of mood music and they're very much centred around specific vibes or aesthetics. It all started when I was trying to make a playlist based on the video game Earthbound, and then it got more specifically about the beach level of that game, so I ended up mining what I'd call "16Bit Balearic".
I've done a playlist called that is numinous and wintry, a sort of implacable mix of soothing neo-classical music mixed with more tempestuous and upsetting stuff so it doesn't just become an Einaudi-fest. That one's called "Quiet & Falling".
Then there's one that has a slightly acoustic/Latin vibe but not exactly called STRING.
I also have one called "SEED" which is sort of rural-ambient-drone-folk-horror.

Which comic artists are you thinking of?

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, February 24, 2022 11:03 AM

Kind of scribbly alternative stuff that seems more viable in mainstream now, I'm blanking a bit but I think Loic Locatelli and Muriel Bellini have a bit of it even if the latter is a lot more underground looking and they are very different, but I'm seeing more artists willing to make a total mess and it's cool. There's an artist I'm forgetting, she's in a punk band and everything is super wonky, I can't get on my instagram anymore so I can't name many names

Lale Westvind is great and I don't know if that new book is ever coming out. Forgot about how comics can delay forever

an aesthetic i'm really liking is dance music nights that de-emphasize starpower and treating people like cattle with wallets. man power is doing this in the uk, i saw some other night called 'fuck it, let's dance' that's also on this tip. also musical and lineup diversity.

not really an aesthetic but more of a way of balancing doing something for the joy of it with business i suppose.