Night luxe is an aesthetic called “night luxe” that embodies the kind of performative opulence one usually encounters at New Year’s Eve parties: champagne, disco balls, bedazzled accessories, and golden sparkles. It is one of many aesthetic designations for which the internet has contrived a buzzy, meaningless portmanteau.
TikTok has accelerated the use of cutesy aesthetic nomenclature
Anything that’s vaguely popular online must be defined or decoded – and ultimately, reduced to a bundle of marketable vibes with a kitschy label.
- Trend brain encourages us to simplify everything online into something either buyable, understandable, or moral (and therefore worthy of consumption).
- There is a devout certainty to the speed at which they’re cycled through.
My theory begins with cottagecore.
cottagecore, an online aesthetic that glamorizes aspects of rural living, went viral on TikTok in 2020
- It became a lifestyle to emulate via mass consumption through nap dresses, woven bags, rustic home trinkets, and a room’s worth of plants
- Modern consumers are bombarded with a stream of inconsequential trends to take note of – marketing vessels for products that fit into a paradigm devoid of meaning
- Trends, or the illusion of a trend, benefit the fast-fashion companies and direct-to-consumer brands making products that aesthetically align with fleeting fancies
- The effects of trend-induced brain rot have trickled into online discourse
- Topics and figures deemed most important on the internet are based on where they fall along the spectrum of trendiness, depending on the scale of attention they command
- Recuperation: the process by which subcultural ideas and images become commodified and reincorporated into mainstream society
- Today, recuperation is achieved through micro-aesthetics, memes, and online communities they stem from
- Unlike the radical subcultures of yore, which had their own visual schema, language, and aesthetics, these digital scenes aren’t exactly subcultural
- They often promote a sort of political anesthetization
Trend brain operates on dichotomies: relevant vs. irrelevant, good vs. bad, buyable vs. unbuyable, cool vs. uncool
Even a whimsical aesthetic can become a commodified status signal – a way to demonstrate that you’re a distinct individual who is in the know
- With the mass decentralization of culture, even while platforms are becoming increasingly centralized, there’s no way for a sane person to keep up
- The problem is, we’re told that we can
- We’re told we must evolve or our digital personas will wither into irrelevance as our style grows stale
