TikTok’s rapid trend cycle has led to a distillation of femininity into aesthetics du jour. Are these an empowering opportunity to explore our multifaceted identities or is this a performative and gaze-focused embodiment of existing online as women?

I’ve been “hanging out”, “perusing”, “scrolling” a lot on TikTok lately. Like, a lot. To the point where I’m gonna happily ignore my TikTok screen time stats. It’s been fun for the most part, watching short little videos that range from niche pop culture moments to a thorough multi-step guide to making kombucha at home (I have no intentions of making kombucha but will I watch the entirety of the video? YES). Lately though, my FYP has been overrun by dozens of aesthetic descriptions, each with a more ridiculous name than the next.

It’s hard to avoid the proliferation of aesthetics, be they -core and whatnot, on the app these days. Ranging from style moodboards to daily routine breakdowns, it seems that these days every aspect of femininity online has been dissected and categorized into a type.

Observing from a fashion viewpoint, Refinery29’s Frances Sola-Santiago writes in an article that “we’ve entered an era when fashion’s subcultures are now “core” trends, from cottagecore to coastal grandmother to weird girl. While on the surface, it may seem like a good thing that previously niche aesthetics have skyrocketed in popularity and opened the door for freer style expression, it also made everyone look the same.” She continues to say that “Style on TikTok has evolved into a series of peer-pressured dress-up sessions that have people jumping in and out of aesthetics, trends, and identities to fit the latest craze […] hindering our ability to develop an innate personal style”. Sola-Santiago is bang on the money here, but it goes much deeper than solely our voracious consumer society where individualism and the desperate need to fit in go ironically hand in hand.

I think it’s important to note that although these are primarily style trends, there are behaviors and traits intrinsic to each of these “aesthetics”. Aesthetics are a guide to a hyper-specific lifestyle that can be injected into your current reality. Cottagecore connotes a kind of docile femininity, Indie Sleaze shares similarities with Fleabag Era where messy makeup implies a chaotic and nihilistic lifestyle revolving around self-destructive choices, Coquette (inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita…yikes) is flirtatious and worships at the altar of Sofia Coppola. Another factor is the oversimplified tone of these aesthetics, a distilling of years of historical and cultural context into a slapdash moodboard. Pitchfork published an article last year on the enduring appeal of Twee, noting it’s roots in the late 1970s as a reaction to the punk movement and later resurging in the ‘00s thanks to the cutesy consumerist appeal of stars like Zooey Deschanel.

What all these aesthetics have in common is their performative nature. I’ve started getting reaction videos on my FYP, where men comment on the Indie Girl aesthetic, tying this type’s penchant for boots and turtlenecks to her supposedly fragile mental health and affinity for Sally Rooney novels. It reminded me of a lecture I had last week on the male gaze, as my Millenial lecturers pointed out the popularity of the manic pixie dream girl during the mid-2000s (shout out to Zooey Deschanel once again and Natalie Portman in Garden State). Some of these TikTok aesthetics feel like the Second Coming of the MPDG - something which struck me while reading Emma Garland’s DAZED article on Fleabag era and disassociative feminism, a trend that purports to be anti-male gaze but I think internalizes the appeal of the tragic and cynical girl.

By slipping on one of the above aesthetics, we assume a different interpretation of femininity until it no longer serves us or putters out as a trend (irrelevance is a fate worse than death). At this point, the line between dress-up/play-acting and reducing ourselves to a category is so thin. The pendulum of performative online femininity swings from intensely clean and devoid of individuality to romanticized self-exploitative chaos. All this to say, we’re in an age of constant trend cycles that seep into every core of our being and make a comeback every few years in an even more reduced state. Existing as a woman online means bowing to the pressure of adhering to one of these aspirational and restrictive aesthetic categories. I wonder when it’ll exhaust itself out and self-implode.

Aesthetic du jour: The Performance of Femininity on TikTok