Teen Subcultures Are Fading (Pity the Poor Kids).

A few weeks ago, my 12-year-old daughter showed me a video created by a Dallas clothing store called Dear Hannah Prep, depicting a girl’s first time visiting “the preppiest boutique in Texas.” “How excited are you?” an off-camera voice asks. “I’m so excited!” the girl says. Then she opens the door, gasps and declares, “It’s so preppy in here!”

That this moment had become a meme, spawning an array of other videos riffing on the original (we see the girl enter a derelict classroom or padded cell and swoon, each time, that it’s “so preppy in here”) was far less confusing to me than the fact that people were calling this store — an all-white box exploding with smiley-face sweatshirts, tie-dyed fuzzy bathrobes and a generally berserk neon beachiness — preppy.

“That,” I told my daughter, “is not preppy.” I did not have much hope of persuading her that millions of teenagers on TikTok were wrong and her 50-year-old mother — who does, in fact, own a copy of Lisa Birnbach’s 1980 “The Official Preppy Handbook” — was right, but it seemed worth trying. I looked around her room, and for lack of any stray loafers or rumpled chinos to use as examples, I touched the top of an antique oak dresser that was once her grandmother’s. “This is preppy,” I said. She rolled her eyes: “Mom, that dresser is super cottagecore, and that is not my aesthetic at all.”

My daughter’s “preppy” is not my idea of preppy — the prep of actual New England prep schools, of frayed Oxford cloth and WASPy noblesse oblige. Nor is it the aspirational varsity style of Tommy Hilfiger and 1990s rappers in rugby shirts, or even J. Crew’s self-conscious 2010s update on old-money style. Those meanings haven’t vanished; a great deal has been written about them lately, much of it connected to Avery Trufelman’s erudite series “American Ivy,” released on her podcast in 2022. But those iterations are now known, in the TikTok world, as “old preppy.” The new sort fills its Pinterest pages with something else: colorful Stanley mugs, tiered pink micro-minis, bulbed makeup mirrors and Brazilian Bum Bum Creams. Part of what makes it hard to describe is that it is not rooted in any specific culture; it seems to be largely about being fun and a girl and buying things packaged with a bright color on a white background. There is no deep ethos to it, no shared experience other than posting videos of shopping hauls or makeup routines — pastimes usually engaged in alone, in your bedroom.

This is not just true of “preppy.” If you are a teenager or have exposure to teenagers, what I am about to write is something you probably know already. Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics and music around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed.

What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any “real life” anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.

For proof, you need only log on to Aesthetics Wiki, a wonderfully encyclopedic website for online style tribes. Here you will find not only large categories like emo, Y2K, VSCO, academia or the perennial goth but also categories so specific that their nicheness begins feeling like an Escher staircase of references. The roughly 200 aesthetics found under the randomly chosen letter M contain some that will be legible to many (Memphis rap, Mod), some that involve a kind of style-sensitive hairsplitting (Mallgoth, Messy French It Girl, McBling) and others that are just full-on W.T.F.: Meatcore is for people who appreciate raw meat as a nondietary object, and Monumentality is the appreciation of anything big, like Godzilla, Gothic cathedrals, giant redwoods or asteroids (“many asteroids are fairly large”). It’s hard to imagine a Monumentality meetup because, like so many aesthetics, Monumentality is only referential, its conversation ending right where it begins: Do you like this big thing? Yes, because it is big.

As with much of today’s popular culture (say, A.S.M.R. hair-brushing or pimple-popping videos), the level of specificity and intimate itch-scratching here feels a lot like porn — another extension of the internet’s ability to service niche desires. And in terms of their enhancement of human experience, many aesthetics seem to offer about as much as porn does: a fleeting personal pleasure to be had mainly alone.

Yet when I look at the younger people in my life — the teenagers crate-digging through these details, arguing about “dark academia” versus “light academia” or the differences between “goblincore” and “crowcore” — it doesn’t seem to me that they want to negate meaning. It seems as though they are looking, hard, for identity, for validation, for the dignification of their taste. It’s just that they are being presented with these thin cultural planes that barely exist outside their devices.

To me, this is tragic, and I feel annoyed on their behalf. So I will risk sounding like an old raver shaking her cane to note that subcultures, even the vapid ones, used to tie their participants to people and places. Getting into a scene could be work; it required figuring out whom to talk to, or where to go, and maybe hanging awkwardly around a record store or nightclub or street corner until you got scooped up by whatever was happening. But at its deepest, a subculture could allow a given club kid, headbanger or punk to live in a communal container from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed. If you were, say, a suburban California skate rat in 1990, skating affected almost everything you did: how you spoke, the way you dressed, the people you hung out with, the places you went, the issues you cared about, the shape of your very body. And while that might not have seemed a promising plan for teenage well-being at the time, by today’s standards of diffuse loneliness and alienation among youth, it looks like a very good recipe indeed — precisely the kind of real-world cultural community that has been replaced by an algorithmic fluidity in which nothing hangs around long enough to grow roots.

by Mireille Silcoff, NY TImes Magazine | Read more:
Image: Photo illustration by Ricardo Santos

[ed. Yeah...not so sure about this. If you extract fashion from the equation there are in fact quite a few prominent subcultures at work, Swifties being only one example - and even there fashion seems like an adjacent aesthetic. Coachella. Gamers, Cosplayers, etc. Maybe I'm missing the point, but this feels like an overly feminized perspective focused on only one dimension of teenage culture.]