We all know that groovy squeeze bottle of Graza olive oil or that spiral Paloma Wool sweater aren’t just meant to look pretty sitting in your pantry or hanging in your closet. They’re meant to be photographed and posted.
On TikTok, such stuff is described as “aesthetic” — an adjective, not a noun — and this new application of the word suggests that you’re not choosing a product that looks pretty, but saying something about your commitment to your sense of identity.
Like the fancy stereo equipment embraced by yuppies in the 1980s, your funky products make your buying habits feel like informed or even cultured choices. You’re not buying olive oil; you’re cultivating a vibe! You’re world-building through your clothes, belongings and groceries, mood-boarding your daily existence.
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You don’t even have to share pictures of these things online for them to be aesthetic. These products insist that there is something more, even something cinematic, to the small and boring choices you make every day.
End of carouselNo cultural figure has lent their work so easily to the “aesthetics” movement than Sofia Coppola, whose Priscilla Presley biopic, “Priscilla,” recently came out and whose movies are contemplative commitments to girlish pleasures and feelings. The way her work has been contextualized online suggests that this strange way of examining ourselves is — like Coppola’s own cinematic view on femininity — deeper than we assume.
This past summer and fall, Coppola’s aesthetic gained traction on TikTok. One of the most popular iterations, based on an explainer by user @latenightwar, involves sharing photos of your unclean room — an unmade bed, piles of journals and books and a disco ball, an assortment of clothing stuffed in a closet, vintage perfume bottles — with a voice-over declaring that this is a statement of the dweller’s inner emotional turmoil:
“Here’s the thing, when a boy’s room is messy, it’s like, ‘Oh my god, he’s filthy. It’s fetid. It’s disgusting. It reeks. You’re lazy, you’re letting yourself go.’ But when my room is messy, when a girl’s room is messy, it’s Sofia Coppola. It’s, ‘Hell is a teenage girl.’ It’s Lindsay Lohan in an early-2000s movie. It’s indie. It’s hot.”
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Is your office filled with Victorian-style furniture, framed photographs of disgruntled White women and a rack of clothing? It’s Coppola-coded. Another meme promises “5 hours of girls getting ready in Sofia Coppola movies - ASMR.” (Alas, further searching suggests no such mash-up exists.)
It seems obvious that Coppola’s work would inspire such treatment. A similar thing happened when Wes Anderson released his film “Asteroid City” earlier this year. Both filmmakers have a highly mannered style in which the look of the film is as essential as the dialogue and plot.
The look of her films often is the plot. She has said that she wanted “The Virgin Suicides” (1999) to resemble a 1970s hair commercial, and for “Marie Antoinette” (2006) to feel like a music video. You’re meant to put together what’s going on by examining a woman’s face or pile of stuff, or by listening to the soundtrack. Which is very much how teenagers, notoriously reticent creatures, also communicate.
If there’s a unifying message, it’s that the surface level is always worthy of scrutiny, celebration and lingering. You shouldn’t overlook the superficial. Prom, or cupcakes, or a bouffant, or even Paris Hilton’s handbag collection are worthy pleasures, and pleasure is something to be treated tenderly. Your flaws — a messy room, a wig addiction (looking at you, Marie Antoinette), your need for fame or your need to shirk from it — are not just faults but are also revelatory of your feelings, your humanness. That so many women seem drawn to the same obvious things, such as pink, Chanel jackets and bags, and floral perfumes, is not a sign that they are suspect. It means they should be embraced as totems of one’s identity. They’re an aesthetic!
In TikTok, Coppola may have found a new generation of champions. Its ability to at once reduce and maniacally pick apart a topic is perfectly suited for her way of examining her own worlds.
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That will inevitably make some self-proclaimed movie purists bristle. But it may also remind you of another filmmaker whose films became a meme-like backbone for how American men understand their masculinity, their sense of duty and the decline of the world around them: Francis Ford Coppola and his Godfather trilogy.
Just as revealing as these videos are the ones that make fun of them, or at least purport to show the failure behind the pursuit of “an aesthetic video”: getting honked at while sauntering across a New York City street, struggling while trying to photograph a hot pink platform shoe next to an elevator’s buttons. A trend is not real until the satirizing starts. But also: A struggling “aesthetic girl” would make an awesome premise for a sequel to “The Bling Ring.”
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