picture of your cereal,” Sophia said, “but you have to make it aesthetic.”
“Aesthetic” looks, aesthetically, like a manifestation of hipster style, as exemplified by Sofia Coppola’s
The Virgin Suicides,
with a dose of
Rookie
and
Real Simple
magazines. “Aesthetic” Instagrams show pictures of filtered pastel skies, girls with expressions bathed in ennui, vintage-looking buildings in black-and-white, and minimalistic bowls of steel-cut oats.
“People say, ‘That’s so my aesthetic,’ ” Sophia said. “And it means literally anything that they like. Like, you could say, ‘Cheerios are so my aesthetic.’ ”
By 2015 “aesthetic” so dominated online culture it was already being satirized.
“Is it aesthetic? Is it aesthetic?”
asked teenage singer Ben J. Pierce (KidPOV) in his satirical “The Aesthetic Song” on YouTube.
“Put a bagel on a blanket—is it aesthetic?”
“It’s so much pressure to make your Instagram aesthetic,” Victoria said with a groan. “You can’t really do anything
wrong.
And if you do, people could laugh at you, like, Oh, look at her Instagram, it’s so not aesthetic—it’s so
basic.
”
(“Basic” was another thing entirely—basically the opposite of “aesthetic,” referring to girls who were behind the trends, the purchasers of too-obvious brands, from Gap to Gucci.)
They talked about how there were girls who used the “aesthetic” style as a way of justifying posting sexualized photos of themselves. “They try to be like Lily-Rose Depp,” Sophia said, rolling her eyes. She was referring to the sixteen-year-old model-actress daughter of actor Johnny Depp and French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis, who had recently become a social media “It” girl. Lily-Rose’s Instagram page, which had more than a million followers, was filled with shots of her beautiful face looking magnificently bored, along with artsy shots in coquettish poses—a “leg shot” on a bed strewn with rose petals. In a video on Instagram, we see her smiling seductively and lip-syncing a line from the Miley Cyrus song “Fweaky (Freaky)”:
“Everything you do just turns me on / So let’s go in my room and ‘na, na…’ ”
“This photo makes me suicidal she’s so fucking gorgeous,” a girl commented on a picture Lily-Rose had posted of herself posing on a runway for Chanel with a horde of paparazzi snapping her.
In an interview in Germany’s
Gala
magazine, Johnny Depp reportedly expressed concern for his daughter. “To be honest, I’m quite worried,” Depp reportedly said. “What’s happening with Lily-Rose right now isn’t what I expected. Definitely not at this age. But these are her passions and she’s having fun.”
“Girls will post, like, pictures of their butt and say, ‘It’s art,’ ” said Melinda, giggling. “But really it’s just their butt.”
“Right now it’s considered cool for older girls to dress up in, like, baby-doll dresses with knee socks and do a caption like, ‘Babysit Me,’
‘Virgin,’
” said Sophia, sounding disgusted.
At a time when the number one search on the Internet’s biggest porn site was for “Teen,” it was disturbing to learn that it had simultaneously become a trend among some teenage girls to style themselves to look even younger than they were as a way of appearing “hot.” The “barely legal” aesthetic is a sort of subset of “aesthetic.” There are posts on Tumblr, Instagram, and other sites with hashtags such as #BabyDoll, #LittleGirl, and #DaddysGirl, tagged to images of girls and young women (whose ages can’t always be determined) in photos where they seem to appear as sexualized little girls. Often such images include an older-looking man engaging in some kind of rough sex play with the girls. “I think it’s weird,” said Sophia.
Some young feminists have argued that such photos, or any photos by girls of themselves in sexual poses, are a valid expression of female sexuality,
“Aesthetic” looks, aesthetically, like a manifestation of hipster style, as exemplified by Sofia Coppola’s
The Virgin Suicides,
with a dose of
Rookie
and
Real Simple
magazines. “Aesthetic” Instagrams show pictures of filtered pastel skies, girls with expressions bathed in ennui, vintage-looking buildings in black-and-white, and minimalistic bowls of steel-cut oats.
“People say, ‘That’s so my aesthetic,’ ” Sophia said. “And it means literally anything that they like. Like, you could say, ‘Cheerios are so my aesthetic.’ ”
By 2015 “aesthetic” so dominated online culture it was already being satirized.
“Is it aesthetic? Is it aesthetic?”
asked teenage singer Ben J. Pierce (KidPOV) in his satirical “The Aesthetic Song” on YouTube.
“Put a bagel on a blanket—is it aesthetic?”
“It’s so much pressure to make your Instagram aesthetic,” Victoria said with a groan. “You can’t really do anything
wrong.
And if you do, people could laugh at you, like, Oh, look at her Instagram, it’s so not aesthetic—it’s so
basic.
”
(“Basic” was another thing entirely—basically the opposite of “aesthetic,” referring to girls who were behind the trends, the purchasers of too-obvious brands, from Gap to Gucci.)
They talked about how there were girls who used the “aesthetic” style as a way of justifying posting sexualized photos of themselves. “They try to be like Lily-Rose Depp,” Sophia said, rolling her eyes. She was referring to the sixteen-year-old model-actress daughter of actor Johnny Depp and French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis, who had recently become a social media “It” girl. Lily-Rose’s Instagram page, which had more than a million followers, was filled with shots of her beautiful face looking magnificently bored, along with artsy shots in coquettish poses—a “leg shot” on a bed strewn with rose petals. In a video on Instagram, we see her smiling seductively and lip-syncing a line from the Miley Cyrus song “Fweaky (Freaky)”:
“Everything you do just turns me on / So let’s go in my room and ‘na, na…’ ”
“This photo makes me suicidal she’s so fucking gorgeous,” a girl commented on a picture Lily-Rose had posted of herself posing on a runway for Chanel with a horde of paparazzi snapping her.
In an interview in Germany’s
Gala
magazine, Johnny Depp reportedly expressed concern for his daughter. “To be honest, I’m quite worried,” Depp reportedly said. “What’s happening with Lily-Rose right now isn’t what I expected. Definitely not at this age. But these are her passions and she’s having fun.”
“Girls will post, like, pictures of their butt and say, ‘It’s art,’ ” said Melinda, giggling. “But really it’s just their butt.”
“Right now it’s considered cool for older girls to dress up in, like, baby-doll dresses with knee socks and do a caption like, ‘Babysit Me,’
‘Virgin,’
” said Sophia, sounding disgusted.
At a time when the number one search on the Internet’s biggest porn site was for “Teen,” it was disturbing to learn that it had simultaneously become a trend among some teenage girls to style themselves to look even younger than they were as a way of appearing “hot.” The “barely legal” aesthetic is a sort of subset of “aesthetic.” There are posts on Tumblr, Instagram, and other sites with hashtags such as #BabyDoll, #LittleGirl, and #DaddysGirl, tagged to images of girls and young women (whose ages can’t always be determined) in photos where they seem to appear as sexualized little girls. Often such images include an older-looking man engaging in some kind of rough sex play with the girls. “I think it’s weird,” said Sophia.
Some young feminists have argued that such photos, or any photos by girls of themselves in sexual poses, are a valid expression of female sexuality,
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