[Miscellaneous Word]-Core: How Consumer Power Interferes with the Life Cycle of “Aesthetics”
Is there a reason why everyone and their mother seems to be obsessed with "Y2K-inspired" fashion nowadays?
The short clips Jenna Barclay Testa posts to her Instagram and TikTok pages (which boast approximately 150,000 followers and 306,000 followers respectively) are relatively simple to understand and follow regardless of the viewer’s generation: They range from outlandishly sarcastic reenactments of situations a typical person might have experienced during their teenage and young adulthood years had they taken place between the mid-1990’s and late-2000’s to “get-ready-with-me”-style clips of Barclay dressing herself up in outfits heavily associated with that era, with random top 40 hits from said era used as a musical backdrop.
Barclay herself claims that the majority of her audience is comprised of millennials (the generational cohort often defined as people born between 1981 to 1996) and Generation Z (the generational cohort often defined as people born between 1997 and 2012). The user demographics of both Instagram and TikTok do justify and substantiate her claim, although Instagram boasts a larger millennial user base than TikTok, and TikTok boasts a larger Generation Z user base than Instagram.
In this TikTok clip, Barclay reenacts a hypothetical scenario where her teenage self would dare a friend to request a certain song from a local radio station and dedicate it to a mutual friend.
(Courtesy of Jenna Barclay Testa - @jennaabarclay on TikTok)
“Millennials can comment on [my content], and have their opinion as somebody who was there,” Barclay shares, “at the same time, Gen[eration] Z can adopt it as something that is new to them.”
The younger people - the Generation Z-ers - who follow Barclay and her work, she tells me, are not necessarily following for a dose of nostalgia, but rather to use her content as style inspiration amid a current resurgence of late 1990’s and early 2000’s fashion under the umbrella term of “The Y2K Aesthetic”.
Anecdotally citing her own fascination with the fashion of the 1960’s and 1970’s as a teenager and young adult, Barclay attributes the “Y2K Aesthetic” resurgence to the “20-year cycle” of fashion - the idea that fashion, at every given point in time, is akin to a ferris wheel - with certain era-defining trends and looks making their way back into the zeitgeist approximately 20 years after gradually being deemed obsolete by both the industry movers and shakers and, consequently by proxy, the general public.
With that theory in mind, and based on multiple peculiarities from early 2010’s fashion popping up on TikTok (think tennis skirts and plaid), multiple fashion publications, including Vogue, have voiced their predictions for an upcoming resurgence of “Indie Sleazecore” - the aesthetic better known within numerous online circles as the “Tumblr 2014 Aesthetic” - although some sources theorize that “Dark Academia”, one of TikTok’s most popular fashion subcultures, draws heavily from the “Twee” subculture, which was also popularized by Tumblr at its peak.
These two Google Trends charts showcase the popularity of "Dark Academia" and "Cottagecore" - two of the most popular fashion subcultures on TikTok - from 2018 to 2023. Both terms were virtually not on anyone's radar until the end of the 2010's, when TikTok started establishing its presence as the "It" social media platform.
(Data retrieved and embedded from Google Trends)
Lisa Ehlin, a professor at Stockholm University’s Centre for Fashion Studies in Sweden and the author of a 2014 study titled Reblogging Fashion: Participatory Curation on Tumblr, also affirms the role of the “20-year cycle” when it comes to trend resurgence, although she argues that the ball is in the consumers’ court at the moment rather than the fashion industry’s.
“Nostalgia for styles that were in 15 or 20 years ago is just the cycle of subculture and trends in general,” Ehlin explains, “but now it just skips over the fashion seasons and goes directly to the archive that we now have online all the time.
Fashion, as an industry, has very much always been working backwards and forwards. Perhaps now they [the industry] are the ones who have to adapt a bit more.”
With the way the algorithms of social media outlets like the aforementioned Instagram and TikTok heavily rely on triggering instant gratification within users, ways have been paved for even more aesthetics, many of which are getting more and more niche, such as “Balletcore”, “Kidcore”, and a myriad of other overtly niche microaesthetics. Notably, a lot of these microaesthetics follow a “[Insert Word/Idea Here]-Core” naming scheme - something that is already starting to get parodied by way of internet sleuths spreading claims that the easiest way to find out what one’s true aesthetic really is would be typing in their first name followed by the suffix “-core” into the search engine of image-sharing site Pinterest, a site ultimately used by many for style inspiration, almost like a lookbook.
With that in mind, Colorado-based fashion content creator Drew Joiner would make the argument that TikTok is also occupying the online lookbook space, especially for members of Generation Z like himself.
“It’s important to note that over the course of the last five to eight years, and how social media has changed, is that more and more subculture groups exist now than ever before, and it's kind of hard to keep track of them,” he says, “but, you know, whether it's good or bad is a question in the story for another day.”
Himself a member of Generation Z, Joiner often discusses the fashion trends that shaped the fashion subcultures associated with websites like TikTok on his own TikTok page.
(Courtesy of Drew Joiner - @drewjoiner on TikTok)