Meme-ification-core: the aesthetic collision between fashion & online cultures
From Big Red Boot to furries, the tone of recent fashion and memes are syncing up & can be examined through the lens of cringe, post-irony, algorithmic radicalisation & Adorno's aesthetic theory.
If you are chronically online or share a similar algorithm to me, you will have noticed some striking silhouettes plastered around the internet at the moment. The feed is suddenly dominated with MSCHF’s Big Red Boots, Sam Smith’s BRITs outfit by Harri, and models play-acting furries in the ‘Please Don’t Eat my Friends’ Collina Strada NYFW runway.
Without pausing for breath these moments were metabolised into the internet through memes. The Big Red Boots’ Astro Boy homage was written on the packet, goofy and whimsical to the extreme; Sam Smith’s retaliatory body-positive red carpet look was jettisoned straight toward the concurrently relevant Chinese Spy Balloon; and Collina Strada’s animals (while perhaps more niche) did not escape notice, with Dazed riffing on it via a Family Guy reference.
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The playful, ironic and referential aesthetic of all these outfits more than just hint at online trends, their very design embodies the essence of recent memetic humour.
Of late, many online memes have spawned around clowning and silly-goose tropes, and the extreme contours of Sam Smith and the Big Red Boot lean right into this. Further, MSCHF painstakingly references what is widely accepted as the first anime to popularise the genre, Astro Boy, at a time when anime and furrie aesthetics are widely spoofed within meme culture.
Of course, sartorial style has always borrowed from contemporary context —art imitates life, it’s just that right now a lot of life is very online.
It stands to reason that there is a shared spirit linking current strands of fashion and meme/internet culture as a genre. In doing so, the mirror between our physical and online worlds simultaneously shatters and solidifies in real-life, real-time.
Some designers might be oblivious or have no desire to become part of internet canon, while others are overtly aware (e.g. MSCHF itself a brand named and famed for mischievousness) . Like it or not, these looks are now part of the fabric of meme culture. Note too that there is a marked difference also between wearing memes (like Cara Delevingne’s Super Bowl Rihanna T-Shirt, largely derided as cringe and not funny), and fusing meme aesthetic into fashion. While all this discussion is obscenely silly and ridiculous, it is nonetheless interesting to dissect the intersection between the environment of the online and physical worlds through these sartorial examples as part of our modern zeitgeist.
Theodor Adorno’s posthumous book on “Aesthetic Theory” begins rather circularly by stating that “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.” The same circuitousness arises attempting to pinpoint the influence that internet meme culture might have on fashion and vice versa. Adorno’s philosophy on art and aesthetic centres around “truth” content which is influenced not only by the artist/creators overt intention but also from the environment and context it was created in.
Memeable, larger-than-life looks are now a mainstay. When Gaga wore the meat dress in 2010 I would unwittingly think about that moment at least bi-annually for the next 5 years. Now, Doja Cat’s eyelash Dali look has already overwritten her Schiaparelli tonsil red Swarovski gem moment in my mind. Central Saint Martin’s Fredrik Tjærandsen's balloon dress and again Schiaparelli’s animal head designs seem like forerunners to Sam Smith in Harri and Collina Strada respectively, memetic, both in terms of design and internet virality.
The evolution of hypebeast footwear fashion has now become such that a “what are thooose” reaction to any kind of clothing is a cringey dad joke. Uggs, Crocs and Birkenstocks are mainstays, having lived through and survived a meme-slaught they seem now immune to ridicule. This example was perhaps a crude blueprint for the now prolific genre of ‘cringe,’ and demonstrates that cringe can transcend to become meta-cringe and survive outside a joke, unironically.
It was only a few years ago that the #clowncore aesthetic flared up, worn by the likes of Harry Styles and Emma Corbin. Celebrated for its silliness, maximalism and sense of fun, clowning also captures the essence of ironic (and moreover post-ironic) internet humour. For both clown-core as an aesthetic and clowning as a meme, there’s a tone of silly mixed with sadness that crystallises around self-awareness.
The hermeneutic popularisation of the suffix ‘-core’ is a clear intersection between fashion and memetics. Its meaning has been assumed by the netizens as a way to catalogue both aesthetics, memes and combinations thereof. Genres have spawned such as “cottagecore,” “glitchcore,” “norm core,” “gorpcore,” and now even “corecore” which is meant to capture the nihilistic and meta-self-aware existentialism of “core” as a concept. From this, we can see how the meme community agrees upon humour and indexes stimulus at breakneck pace.
From a marketing standpoint, garnering online hype around fashion is clearly a desirable end. The more outrageous or baffling fashion is, the more likely it is to catch hold within our attention economy. Brands are hyper-aware of internet influence and in all likelihood lean into garish tropes to whip up hype, despite the fact that the meme-sphere is notoriously chaotic, because all press is good press.
The following statement by Joshua Citarella, internet researcher and writer, not only applies to memes but can be replaced with the word fashion as a truism for that fashion industry. “[…] memes function as a type of exploit in today's attention economy. Potent memes will get stuck in your head for days. Once the concept takes hold, it becomes difficult to mentally steer out of. Memes nudge our way of thinking. They become a type of augmented reality, overlaying the world and social relationships.” Brands would of course try to capitalise on this conduit, but may not themselves be immune from internet and its influence.
Internet is a place where hyperbole flourishes, unrestrained by physical bounds. Memes typically champion unrefined graphics, which ties hand-in-hand with irony. Cringe memetics, which centre around an essence that is seemingly earnest but also viscerally unbearable, rely upon a shared sense of irony. Self-aware cringe, or meta-cringe, in this space, can be seen as powerful. Perhaps what these memetic outfits are trying to manifest.
All these aforementioned looks were instantly meme-able, but also a meme in and of themselves. Despite how serious some of the designers intended to be, the very fact that these collections leant so neatly into the goofy or cringey internet genre demonstrates the cultural relevance of internet humour or at least a subconscious awareness of it. The internet loves to be meta, pastiche, self-referential and so this wearable aesthetic spoof makes for a perfect feedback loop.
Both internet humour and runway style race toward the same end of signalling self-awareness, cultural relevance, and being “in” — whether that be in on the joke or in fashion.
Fashion, historically self-serious, increasingly sees the value and cultural capital not just in solemn-irony but with silly-irony, leaving audiences thinking “is this a joke?” Fashion has always been a perpetual race for currency — it’s just that now so much of what is relevant and cultural, is digital.
A more sinister look on how the shock-jock value of fashion might continue to reflect online aesthetic can draw on the theory of algorithmic radicalisation, or the radicalisation pipeline. This is the idea that social media feeds users increasingly extreme content as the platform is used over time, to keep things fresh for continued engagement, but which then likely results in normalising and escalating exposure to ever more radical political opinions.
Fashion as art is not apolitical. As Adorno highlights, it has the power to signal a deeper cultural truth, separate from the artist’s intent or the consumer’s reading. Without being a doomsayer, perhaps core-core is set to manifest on runways sooner rather than later. With the growing market of digital avatar fashion too it will be interesting to see how the online experience and its messy ironic and post-ironic politics shapes “worn” aesthetics.
The internet will always signal radicalisation earlier than it will be sartorially reflected, but for now we can giggle to our screens at those silly, unstyleable honk of a Big Red Shoe. Fashion will continue to tip its hat toward online scenes until that gentle tip becomes a fervent nod, becomes an open-mouthed panting — as physical style and the digital world continue to coalesce, chasing each other’s tails.
