What’s My Aesthetic? It’s the Hottest Question of the Moment

“I have a dress with tiny butterflies on it and it’s also white, is that also okay?” asked one commenter. “Yes anything is ok…I bet that dress is gorgeous,” the creator responded.

Wanting to fit in or label yourself isn’t a new concept. Just look at every high school movie of the past 50 years, notes Michael Spicher, PhD, a philosopher who runs the Aesthetics Research Lab, which studies how “aesthetics influences everyday decisions and actions” in society.

“I haven’t been in high school in a really long time, but you’d be identified in these different groups,” he tells me. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re a jock,’ ‘you’re a prep.’”

That yearning to be labeled and placed in a neat box hasn’t changed for teenagers, he muses; perhaps it has just evolved. That this became so prevalent among young people while many of them were forced to miss high school and college because of COVID-19, spending some of their most formative years social distancing, doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

“This is something that I think they can control,” Dr. Spicher speculates. “After what the world just went through in the last few years, I think people are looking for that more than ever, looking for some kind of way to control their lives. And this is one of those things that they can do.”

He may be onto something, Olivia Layne, a TikTok creator and self-described “elder Gen Z” tells me. Layne, who has more than 216,000 followers on her pop-culture-themed account, has watched the proliferation of aesthetics on the platform with curiosity and amusement. It may very well be, she says, that young women are seeking connection after the past few years.

“I think maybe they’re trying to find community with others, and the way they’re doing that is by grouping themselves by what they like and by how they dress,” she says.

There are other factors, she thinks. Many young people grew up in the age of Tumblr and stan Twitter, where “a big part of it is curating a vibe and curating an identity around the things you like,” she says. “So I think now we’re seeing that expand on TikTok, where it’s not just about you liking Lana del Rey, it’s ‘now you like Lana del Rey and you dress in coquette-ish aesthetic.’ People want to curate little identities for the things that they like.”

As more and more aesthetics emerge, though, Layne has grown a bit uncomfortable about who they are appealing to, and who they are leaving out. 

“What is the clean girl aesthetic? Because you’re showing pictures of Hailey Bieber as if that’s the standard that we should all be for this aesthetic that you think is the best,” she says. “And it’s like, everyone doesn’t look like Hailey Bieber.”

In a video she made in January, Layne pointed out the similarities between the clean girl aesthetic, the vanilla girl aesthetic, and the that-girl aesthetic. Mainly, they are all pretty exclusionary.

“I think when you get down to what these aesthetics are and the similarities between all of them, at the end of the day, a lot of them do boil down to being thin and white and pretty. That’s the vibe, and that’s the aesthetic,” she tells me. “And so I do think it’s a valid criticism that people are questioning, like, ‘What do these aesthetics mean?’”