Girl, So Conformist: How Aesthetic Trends are Cramping your Style and Advancing Fascism
Hitler allegedly hated a red lip, but he’d love the clean girl aesthetic
You can take this quiz to get a catchy name for your personal style. You can buy a whole new wardrobe at the click of a button.
Pinterest “predicts” new aesthetic trends, then spends who-knows-how-much to try to make them appear. Influencers make up new buzzwords to sell SHEIN and Amazon products.
Then, when the last trend dies and a new one takes its place, don’t worry! It’s never been easier to redo your life completely at the drop of a hat.
Just add a few new items to cart, dump the old ones in the landfill, and make sure to tag the right aesthetics when you post your new look.
Girl.
Aesthetics are an empty, surface-level scheme for life, style, and consumption, and it’s a scheme that advances the fascist ideal of conformity.
It’s cramping your style
Ok, so you revamped your closet and now you’re “coastal grandmother”, “pastel academia”, “indie sleaze” or “clean girl”.
But, as Lindsey Louise of
asks, what did that get you?An aesthetic by definition is a surface-level look. It does not come with culture, it does not come with memories, and it comes far too easy.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to like the look of something. I like many garments and styles that could fall under the umbrella of something like “whimsi-goth”, “cottagecore”, or “Y2K”.
But trending internet aesthetics are driven by a culture of copy-paste.
You see an influencer, you like their aesthetic, and they helpfully direct you to a link where you can buy every piece of the outfit.
All of this amounts to a personal style that’s anything but personal. You didn’t discover it, cultivate it, or hone it.
And because you have no real attachment to it, you find it easy to trade it in for the next model.
Shopping is fun and cathartic for a lot of people, but this method sucks the fun out of it in my opinion. There’s no hunt, no quest, no discovery.
Copy-paste. Add to cart. Click, click.
Monotony. Impulse. Meaninglessness.
There is so much fun, self-expression, and creativity to be found in real personal style. The aesthetic-mania, however, commodifies fun, homogenizes self-expression, and stifles creativity.
It’s throwing off your groove, girl.
It’s distracting you
To quote Ms. Lindsey again (she’s brilliant), “Life is expensive, but ‘luxuries’ are not”.
If you’re anything like me, you can barely afford the rent your parents charge—let alone the exorbitant amounts it takes to strike out alone. A house, property of your own with a mortgage? Forget about it.
Gas prices, egg prices, taxes, and, god forbid, you’re trying to get a degree right now.
The rising cost of being alive is squeezing us in on all sides. It’s hard to hope for a bright future, hard to want beautiful things, hard to invest in silly dreams.
Yet, so-called luxuries have never been more accessible.
While they’re busy commodifying human needs, real commodities are becoming cheaper. You can’t fix your debt or the state of the world, but you can buy our new perfume, the latest Stanley, and a whole new wardrobe with free shipping.
It feels like luxury. It feels like control and security. It feels good.
Girl, it’s keeping you distracted.
The push for consumption is the circuses to our starving Panem and we are the citizens of district one, cosplaying Capitol extravagance.
Shopping is fun, yes, but as you see in the 2009 hit film “Confessions of a Shopaholic”, it’s not a sustainable way to fill the void.
Do you lack meaning and purpose? Hit add to cart. Are you afraid of what the future holds? At least, there’s free shipping! You might not be able to afford eggs, but with our easy six-month payment plan1, you can afford Jimmy Choo!
Next thing you know you’re hiding credit cards in ice blocks because you need that green scarf.
Humor aside, it’s harder to navigate the issue of overconsumption than we want to think, because it is a coping mechanism for so many people. It can become a real addiction—one that you’re bombarded with advertisements for day in and day out.
Aesthetics feed further in to this, distracting you from real issues with the latest discourse on skinny jeans. Are they cute? Are they chic? Are they horrible and uncomfortable?
The actual answer is, it depends. Real personal style is personal, tailored to you.
The girl in the green scarf at least had a feel for her own unique style. Still, at the end of the day, her shopaholicism was a coping mechanism to distract from a sense of hopelessness.
It pressures you to conform
Finally, at the heart of the issue, we have the advancement of conformity.
A combination of relentless advertising, trending aesthetics, and impossible standards has us chasing a moving goal post.
Consider plastic surgery. People with successful surgeries are praised—it looks so natural, you age backwards, you look like a million bucks. Meanwhile, that’s about what they had to spend to achieve that.
It’s taken as a given that nobody wants to show signs of aging. Aging’s not aesthetic after all. It’s not clean, it’s not shiny and fresh.
You are quietly punished for standing apart and standing out in the wrong ways. And god forbid, you get a botched plastic surgery. Then, they pretend you were heinous for wanting it in the first place.
These standards are quietly and insidiously spread through online discourse, punishing girls who do it “wrong” or want it too openly, while ostracizing and hiding those who doesn’t conform at all.
If this trend has its way, everyone comes out looking the same.
A result that is also key to fascist ideals.
Yes, it really is that deep. Fascism yearns for conformity. White supremacy, apartheid regimes, persecution of minorities and erasure of differences and disabilities—this is all fascism attempting to create a world where everyone looks the same.
The clean girl aesthetic wants to look pure and effortless. You wear a mask that looks like your face, but better—the goal is to look natural even while your actual face is considered unfit for public viewing.
Do I really have to spell out the problem with that?
Not to mention attempts to divorce punk and other countercultures from both “counter” and “culture”. These trends de-fang meaning and repackage them as empty aesthetics.
Hitler allegedly hated a red lip2, but he would’ve loved the clean girl aesthetic.
Why be a wallflower?
“Cultures” that lack culture, styles that aren’t personal, and “statements” that don’t actually say anything. That’s all aesthetics peddle.
As Marina, previously Marina & the Diamonds, said in “Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land”: “you don’t have to be like all the rest, you are not here to conform”.
We are each unique, from the inside out. Not to be all “everyone’s special”, but, well, it’s true.
Why flatten what makes you special in favor of a micro-trend? Why cramp your style just to fit in?
Fashion, like art, music, and pretty much everything else, cannot be fully divorced from political ideas and contexts. Aesthetics attempt to do just that, selling you surface-level style that tends to also be a Trojan horse for ideas of conformity, classism, and fascism.
True luxury is self-expression, clothing that lasts and brings you meaningful joy, and the ability to spend time and money on things that actually matter.
To quote Marina again, “why be a wallflower when you can be a Venus fly trap?”
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For more on the politics of fashion, aesthetics, and finding your actual personal style, I highly recommend The Official Nancy Drew Newsletter:
I first got the idea for this article from a Culture Vulture post by the brilliant Aniqah. Read it here:
Also, because Marina is the queen of non-conformity:
You shouldn’t have to pay off shoes, babe, cmon
There’s a widespread idea accepted as fact that Hitler loathed red lipstick. Sadly, this may be less than truth. The story is still interesting: it stems from American newspapers printing stories about German women being banned from wearing makeup and advertisements framing makeup as “good for mural” and “a woman’s duty”.