Fashion and finding one’s own style has been an integral part of growing up since before the term “teenager” was even invented, but during the pandemic, the idea of “aesthetics” started to rise amongst tweens and teens, going from a term for analyzing art and design to a description of how one dresses and conducts themselves in everyday life.
According to the article “The Aesthetics of the Self: The Meaning and Making of Internet Aesthetics,” internet users wanted to catalog and track different styles of art, fashion, subculture and music, especially ones that had arisen in small Internet niches that weren’t recognized by the outside world. Although on a decline since their peak around 2021, you’ve probably still heard quite a bit about “cottagecore” or “dark academia” if you have young people in your life. The phenomenon of cataloging and boxing one’s own personal style or that of an art piece or music so specifically, and oftentimes trivially, fascinated me to no end.
I had been tracking aesthetic trends for years, and formulating my own opinions about many of them. I even made a series of 26 alphabetical paintings, each one representing a different aesthetic someone had cataloged in the infamous Aesthetics Wiki, a user-made database of aesthetic styles and tropes. Yet I was still showing up to school every day in sweatpants and t-shirts, ignoring my best, and weirdest, clothing items.
On Jan. 27, 2023, I embarked on a New Year’s resolution journey to challenge myself to wear every aesthetic I could, made up of only things I already owned. Shockingly, I’ve actually stuck with it so far.
After selecting 365 fashion-related articles manually, I cut and pasted each link into a spreadsheet with a date next to it and perhaps more importantly, a space to rate each look every day on a scale of 1-4. The rules were simple: Each day put together and wear one of the outfits. Go in alphabetical order if possible, but articles can be moved around for events (I wanted “Christmas” to line up with Christmas, etc.), work, laundry, or weather needs, but not personal taste. The big rule was that nothing that had been already done could be done again.
The most notable result I have found from this experiment was that I actually liked more of the aesthetics than I expected. My “one” rating, meant that I could neither meet the goal outfit, nor enjoyed the aesthetic I was given, and “two” meant one or the other. Both of these categories combined only made up 13.7% of my ratings and helped me pair down what I didn’t like in my wardrobe.
Over the past year, I learned so much from this resolution: From personal realizations about my own sense of style and self to universal lessons of what makes a good goal.
The teenage era of self-exploration that we all go through has changed drastically with the internet to the point that there is no longer one style that is “in” or one look that embodies an era in our magazines and popular media. Even the subcultures, that were once niche areas of the teenage culture have multiplied and come to the surface, meaning that there are many more opportunities to find a place and identity, and also a lot more searching to do, even if it does bring up the question if we need to micro-label every fashion choice. Do we really need to differentiate “Cottagecore,” “Cabincore,” and “Prariecore?” I think the answer is yes. No, they aren’t that different, but it’s about how young people define themselves and learn how to fit in with a group that they get to claim as their own.
When it comes to setting goals for yourself, regardless of age, it became apparent to me how important it is to set specific goals and have a road map ready in advance to reduce the risk of choice paralysis (the inability to choose and often, the choice to do nothing or avoid it altogether), and to keep a constant tracker on your goals so that you can constantly see progress being made. My rating system and the pie chart were constant motivators to keep me on track and stopped me from piling all my “free days” together and giving up.
Speaking of which, factoring in free days was also a big motivator. Remembering I had a safety net for failure and knowing that forgetting was not a problem kept me going throughout the year and reassured me that even if I did forget or got sick, I could just get back up and continue.
In the future, for a New Year’s resolution, I don’t think I could recommend a daily goal like this. Instead, weekly goals might be more successful. Reading a book a week, eating a different breed of apple, getting takeout from a different restaurant, making a new art piece, or playing a new board game with friends, may all be not only more manageable but also more fun and cause less stress and pressure (given that you plan accordingly) than trying to achieve something different daily.
