These days, we’re bombarded with so many aesthetics online — from TikTok’s obsession with Lana Del Rey’s coquettish Americana aesthetic of Coca-Cola bottles, baby pink bows, and American flag paraphernalia, to the rise in Southern Gothic aesthetics that indie darling Ethel Cain boldly ushered in.
But what does this all mean? More importantly, what does it say about Gen Z?
2008 Crash and Americana
Fashion, music, and pop culture usually serve as reflections of the current state of the world. For example, the era of the 2008 financial crash had the same obsession with the Americana aesthetics we have today.
Lana Del Rey’s rise to fame played a big role in the way teenagers at the time viewed America and the Western world during a time of crisis. She garnered traction on Tumblr for being messy, girlish, and ahead of her time. Facing great difficulty, young people needed to tell themselves new stories about America and embrace artists who allowed them to do that.
Lana’s beauty and fashion choices tend to reference darlings of the 20th century. Think Marilyn Monroe’s iconic red lip or Jackie Kennedy’s classic dress sense. Lana modernized these classic looks, adding sneakers or denim shorts to contrast her iconic updo. Her voice was timeless, and her lyrics centered on the American Dream. The monolith of Americana was able to live on in the youth of 2008 through the style choices of this artist.
Lana Del Rey and Ethel Cain
Ethel Cain’s take on Americana is much darker, satirizing the iconography of America and alluding to the issues it causes. Disillusioned adolescence, insecure youth, religious trauma, and loss at the hands of war are just some of the ideas she discusses in her most recent album Preacher’s Daughter.
This aesthetic is referred to as Southern Gothic and involves wearing neutrals: beige, white, and brown, as well as linens, lace, and patterned fabrics. The quintessential Southern Gothic look is a long-sleeve white fit ‘n flare dress, with some sort of functional boot.
The aesthetic as a whole also encompasses elements of the Gothic: images of abandoned churches, high school sports grounds, empty fields, and the Christian cross. These images are all captured through a washed film filter. Southern Gothic criticizes the values of Americana while endorsing it through its visuals. It certainly provides a lot of solace for the disillusioned teenagers of today.
Gen Z’s Obsession with Aesthetics
Both presentations of Americana through modern fashion trends and aesthetics tell of their respective zeitgeists and cultural views of America and the West. However, 2024 has a unique relationship with aesthetics that complicates this altogether.
Gen Z really commits to their aesthetics. It’s probably because they grew so attached to fashion and aesthetics as a form of expression during Covid lockdowns. During this time, everybody was left to fend for themselves in terms of keeping busy. However, there’s hardly ever a proper discussion online on the harmful elements. Aesthetics have become so centered around personas, occupations, and hobbies that choosing to participate in one is essentially choosing to subscribe to an entire lifestyle.
Country western is an aesthetic that has grown in popularity on TikTok in recent months. It sees Gen Z wearing cowboy boots, leather jackets, bootcut jeans, large garish belts, and cowboy hats.
This generation’s desire to appear nonchalant and unbothered by aesthetics actually steers us further into harmful territory. People feel pressured to feed into aesthetics as though they are representative of their real identities.
Cosplaying Identity Through Fashion
Gen Z’s chronic onlineness creates a desire for connection through completely offline means. In addition, it fosters a craving for a sense of true, anchored identity, separate from the ever-changing trend cycle that dictates fashion, the content we consume, and our humor.
Country western fashion is a good example of how Gen Z cosplays real identities in order to combat the psychological burden of lacking a stable identity. Romanticizing a time before social media leads, ironically, to even more chronically online behaviors and aesthetics becoming popular.
This is also seen in the rise of the ‘office siren core.’ This aesthetic elicited a huge number of TikToks by romanticizing office work and culture. Another example is ‘blokecore,’ which consists of casual, athletic, or boyish style and makes a spectacle of football and sporting culture in the UK.
Thrifting culture drives Gen Z’s passion for fashion and contributes to the same idea of wanting to appear offline and eclectic. Participants don’t want to admit that their outfit was all bought from one place.
The desire for Gen Z to diversify by assigning themselves these different ‘cores’ is largely unsuccessful. Instead of developing an enriched identity based on genuine interests, the focus shifts to embodying the most desired identity of that month.
The life cycle of a trend is so short that aesthetics no longer represent the people who wear them. Rather, the people who wear them actively try to fit into the aesthetic. The whole process is reversed, and fashion has become a sport rather than an art. Gen Z has made an endless career of trying to catch up to the latest rather than cultivate something new and authentic.
