If you exist online in any aspect, you will know about aesthetics. Trad wife, coquette, and Y2K are all examples of popular online aesthetics. 

The rise of aesthetics occurred online in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a few decades after the rise of trends in teen magazines. While they aren’t inherently bad, they tend to be polarising, pushing us into little boxes and dividing us further. 

The word aesthetic was originally meant to mean sensory perception, or how something appeals to the senses to make itself beautiful. As trends in fashion, home decor, and our general life structures increased the words’ meaning changed. It has come to mean the general look of a trend, something cohesive. 

For example, coquette is an aesthetic based on the look of girly frilly romantic tones, along with certain artists like Lana Del Rey or certain sports like ballet. Inside of the aesthetic are sub aesthetics such as Americana, Dark coquette, and Farmers Daughter.

Our obsession as a society with beauty is not the issue at hand though. Humans were not meant to fit into little boxes, defined by our dress and style. When we polarise fashion it is simply a grab for control when we feel as if we are out of control. 

This claim is supported by the fact that aesthetics resurfaced in 2019 when the pandemic started. Indie, alt, and soft girl were all popular at the time. This is for two reasons. The world felt very out of control at the time so we as a online culture were looking for something to grasp onto, and more and more people were spending copious amounts of time online.m

Slowly though the more people were separated from society and pushed into social media aesthetics started to become exclusive, and if you didn’t follow them to a tee you were considered  a “poser”.

While this exclusive attitude has faded as people have begun rejoining the in person world, aesthetics still remain popular. With this popularity a new trend has arisen. The placement of political or moral views into aesthetics. 

This can be seen particularly in the Trad Wife aesthetic. Women who follow traditional family values of submitting to the man and staying in the house are posting glamorized versions of their lives to the masses. And while everybody has the right to be happy and live the life they want, many of them push this view of family roles onto young girls, leading them to believe it is a fairytale life that they too could have. 

This propaganda, whether is is pushing the idea that you have to fit your style into a box and make everything instagramable or the fact that you have to follow traditional family roles is harmful. Individuality is something that we should celebrate, not hamper. Overall we as a society should move away from the idea of control and simply live our lives to the fullest, however that is for us.