When it comes to internet appreciation, The Brunch Generation have not had it easy, constantly dragged as they are over their incessant materialism and accused of offering little to the world beyond servers of content dedicated to their Airbnb conquests. Yet now it is not just the snowflakes who find themselves in a supercharged obsession with all things grammable. Who exactly doesn’t look at a potential purchase experience in terms of it’s digital attention value (clicks and likes) in addition to any genuine value it might provide in the physical world? And so it is that we have become omnipresent reps for the brands we buy, endlessly featuring them in our latest stories and in so doing selling valuable media impressions for free. Corporate America now officially has us in the ultimate infinity loop. Addicted to the attention, we keep buying and posting more objects, further entrenching ourselves as both the fuel and the fire driving industrial success.
But before you lose all hope, fear not: here enters the next generation of internet natives, and happily they carry a sickle to pierce the bubble of our current Asch Conformity-esque reality: a grassroots movement that reinvents style without traditional capitalist infrastructures. Your friend’s homemade shirt. Your neighbors’ backyard weed brand. Your sister’s zine enterprise that is rapidly deserving of its own P&L on depop. This is the birth of the new bedroom-economy. And you can’t buy it. You can only buy into it.
Welcome to the rise of “bedroom merch” — wearable collections made by people in their bedrooms, for their friends. Why has merch made a major comeback? Meme creators gotta get paid and #sponsored posts can only take you so far. And the bigger labels have taken notice. But now the practice has spread beyond the memers and everyone is up for making a cent or two on the side. Just tag your clothes at the nearest trendy bar and watch the notifications stack up. Before you know it, John Mayer could be wearing your content on stage in what turns out to be a true symbiotic circle: new merch becomes legit merch, or something. Some favorites:
Whatever21, Nature World, Team SESH, Art Baby Girl, Lil Peep, Dream Beam, Molly Soda, Dank.cool, Lil Ugly Mane… and for those prepared to venture beyond instagram CHILL OUT.
How do subcultures decide what their aesthetic will be? In his 1978 primer on biker and hippie communities, Profane Culture, Paul Willis used the term homology to describe “the symbolic fit between the values of a group and the aesthetics they promote.” In other words, if you’re a punk and political chaos is part of your belief system, you make it your goal to look like pure chaos. But what happens when a subculture mostly exists on the internet, away from traditional meeting places like cafes, bars or…the mall? It’s difficult to assess the coherent aesthetics of a digital diaspora that mainly exists in the comments section.
VidCon: Anaheim, CA. Ground zero for the homologic displays of the various Youtube stars and their sub-communities, whose aesthetics are inspired by the click-winning formulas they’ve developed for their digital brands. Whether that be unicorn hair, ASMR nails, expert makeup contouring or a full blown physical homage to Spongebob: the stars (and in turn their fans) have mastered the art of physically capturing and manifesting their digital belief systems for the real world.
Come October, the floodgates are to open on the weed market. No longer will this precocious plant have to hide its bushel under the ridiculous medicinal guise it’s been humoring for so long. From expert alchemist to Euro-Luxe, weed is set to go through a packaging makeover not seen since the the beauty industry woke up to the 80s. The shitty little packs with bro designs and homages to rasta Bob may soon be a thing of the past.
But as with all things in the age of Trump, perhaps the most interesting designs will come less from the big brand agencies, and more from the teen-dream-homespun-artists of instagram — i.e., Y2K heroin glassines. Intersectional unicorn pipes could be having a major moment, alongside boredom slaying rizzlas and homemade edible recipes from every corner of suburbia. When all you need is an @ and a mailing address, selling weed may just be going back to its roots: oldschool bottom-up man-on-the-street entrepreneurship at its best.
Why are we writing about an ancient meme? Because everyone wrote about the meme, and everyone wrote about the fashion line that ripped it off, but no one wrote about the connection between the two.
One of the hottest memes of Q3 2015 was #heelconcept. Hundreds, led by a Brown student known as @henry, posted a perfectly arched foot atop a spread of found objects. Featuring batteries, potatoes, live animals, #heelconcept followed traditional meme constructs by combining polar high (arched foot + fashion culture reference) and low (found objects + digital medium). And…the fashion industry. So of course Vetements former cult leader Demna Gvasalia rose to the occasion. The brand launched their own #heelconcept in the form of couture, casting a footwear line in the likeness of a meme series. It made sense. Vetements is revered for high/low statements (DHL: scam or subversion?), so low media culture on a runway was a logical extension of the meme. Ultimately, they were just building on it. And charging $2,000 for it.
What’s striking about teens in 2017 is that they’re born archivists. Rather than buckling under the weight of metadata, they’ve mastered pattern recognition, sorting, collecting and journaling; adding dimensional meaning and context to large bodies of seemingly disconnected works. They think in volumes, series, snap/instagram stories, editions and curate it all in cross format narratives that work seamlessly to depict a larger perspective. What’s lofi to the rest of the world is hi-fi for them: it doesn’t have to be shiny and perfect; it isn’t about the image quality or perceived creative superiority. This is post-glossy conceptualizing. They call it zine craft. Here are some of our favorite collections of zine content on one of our favorite platforms, Are.na:
Thank you for reading
