Dear amigo,
We live currently in an era where every sliver of human experience is being demystified with a name or a tag, whether it’s the corporate optimism of “Frutiger Aero” or the misty allure of “Gloomcore” our digital landscape is dominated by the obsessive categorization of aesthetics. Even young creatives cannot escape this, as searches over the web looking for things such as so-called Y2k fonts multiply; we know this because we’ve been participants of this ourselves as part of navigating these times.
But, as we slice the past and our personal identities into thousands of hyper-specific tags, aren’t we as well actually losing our ability to create due to a need to streamline and name everything?
Vibes culture: what is it?
In the past, cultural movements were largely regional and driven by a shared ethos. You were “Punk” because of a specific political and social outlook; the clothes were a byproduct of that worldview. Today, we have a so-called “Vibes culture”, a shift where the visual signifier is the entire movement.
If you take five minutes to surf the Aesthetics Wiki, you’ll see these labels often take decades-old styles and flatten them. When we see an old cabin and call it “Cottagecore,” we aren’t engaging with the history of Romanticism or the ecological reality of its landscape. We are simply tagging a vibe for an algorithm to find.
Goodbye, author!
One of the most damaging aspects of this curation obsession is the erasure of the people who actually built these cultures. When art is treated as just interchangeable content, meant to fill a mood board, the original creators, often from marginalized communities, are stripped away.
For example, the “Baddie” and “Bougie” aesthetics on popular wikis are often credited to influencers like the Kardashians, completely ignoring the Black and Latino women who pioneered those styles. When we prioritize the tag over the origin, we practice a form of bad art history that prioritizes PR teams over cultural innovators.
Static Life: when aesthetic rules over
Perhaps the most insidious part of aesthetics culture is how it affects the worldview of young creatives. Digital aesthetics like “Night Luxe” or “That Girl” aren’t just art styles: they are marketed as entire lifestyles.
However, these lifestyles are fundamentally impossible to live, after all, they are static representations: perfect loops of video or curated photos. That cannot account for the messiness of being human. You cannot be “Cottagecore” while you’re at the doctor, and you cannot be “Night Luxe” when the sun comes up.
By trying to mold our lives into these brands, we move away from what is directly lived and into a world of representation. We begin to see ourselves through the eyes of others by practicing a form of self-surveillance rather than self-expression.
So, what can we do?
For young creative people, the past should be a well of inspiration, not a warehouse of labels. Revisiting history should involve taking a single work of art and paying close attention to what makes it tick, rather than deciding if it fits into a pre-existing bucket.
If we want our creative work (and our lives) to have substance, we have to move beyond the transactional relationship we have with content, we need to stop thinking of our identities as personal brands to be marketed and start thinking of them as philosophies to be lived.
Art has the power to fuel us, but only if we stop trying to kill the vibe by naming it.
Signed,
A Type of Jesús
Since you are really into creativity, you might be interested in these other articles and resources:
How a Bad Bunny Album took over the world
