what is the vibe?
Aria Montgomery, you will always be famous
The last time Zoey was in town she did a reading at KGB Bar and one of the other readers was Meg Superstar Princess, who is roommates with one of M’s friends. Meg is like the face of the indie sleaze resurgence and she read this amazing piece about being barred out at the UN General Assembly wherein she referred to herself as “Fashion Nova Gaddafi” while wearing leggings and a black crop top with a military service ribbon pinned to her breast.
Over the summer, Zoey and I saw Meg DJ at Maya Man’s newish loft space Heart (442 Broadway) for the release of Ev Christensen’s album. It was a million degrees inside and outside and Zoey was dissociating by the window in these little denim cut-offs and a purple tie-dye wrap top that she’d fastened in her way. She was holding her hair up off her sweaty neck, looking languid and agitated, when The Cobra Snake came up to her with his neck scruff and baseball cap and took her photograph. She was so pissed.
Meg and Ev were wearing what I can only describe as genie costumes? Fuschia bodysuits with misty blue sashes at the waist, dancing barefoot with toe rings and feathers and eyeliner. It was kind of like Prince Rama––do you remember Prince Rama? The flyer for the event described the DJ set as “Siamese.” Zoey was like, “I hate when she wears a bindi and does an orientalist thing.” The next act was a guy wearing a suit with a skinny tie, like The Dare, but he wasn’t The Dare, he was a tap dancer. Haus of Iconica was there wearing a big red sunhat. Someone else had Hustler waistband boxers peeking out of their orange sequined two-piece set, their hair bleached and crimped, with a snapback reading Who ate all the pussy?
We were smoking cigarettes indoors. Kembra Pfahler said some words. And most notably, everyone was taking pictures on point and shoot digicams with the flash on. I remember turning to Zoey and being like “what is the deal with these digital cameras?” I kept seeing them all summer. There was this one day when I was walking east on Broome Street and saw a young girl taking photos on a digital camera stumble into an astonished Mickey Boardman. She didn’t even know who he was! Of course I know who Mickey Boardman is because my first ever job when I was fourteen was at Screaming Mimi’s and he came in on Halloween and took pictures of me trying on different tiaras in order to find one suitable for a Carrie-themed photoshoot with Chloe Sevigny and owner, Laura, was like “this is my friend Mickey, he’s the director of Paper Magazine.”
Anyway, the median age in the room was probably 24 and I was really struck by the nostalgia for a time none of us really remember. I mean, I remember my parents and grandparents taking family photos on digital cameras, but I was not old enough to be a person with agency who could use this instrument for the purpose of creative expression. A few years ago people were into film photography and Bao Ngo, who shot Mitski’s Be The Cowboy album cover, was kind of a lone crusader with digicam.love, though I guess her aesthetics are dreamier, more saturated, and “filmic” than the gritty, voyeuristic Terry Richardson type of thing. Artifice, as opposed to “authenticity.”
People aren’t just getting digital cameras, they’re also getting flip phones. My friend N got one over the summer, quickly followed by my friend Y (her make and model of choice: the Nokia 2780). I was born in 2001 and got my first cell phone in the fifth grade, a LG Xpression, which was red and had a slide-out keyboard. August Lamm just put out a limited edition risograph pamphlet on Metalabel called You Don’t Need A Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading & Reclaiming Your Life, which was available as a bundle with a dumb phone. But August Lamm seems more into unplugging and embracing the Luddite lifestyle, while the digital camera thing feels more about being fashionably anachronistic, having an accessory or a prop. What I mean to say is that the people wielding digital cameras want to be photographed and posted by someone else with an iPhone. The digital camera is something you can put stickers on and post like “what’s in my bag” alongside a travel-sized bottle of perfume, a lip balm, a pair of sunglasses, and a prop book. The prop book thing is funny, like those DKNY ads that were all over the place last season where Kaia Gerber is holding a copy of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Zoey (who I met in a cybernetics reading group) has been on a retro tech wave for a while because her dad works with computers. Author's note: Zoey writes about all of this stuff in her holiday gift guide, which she released yesterday, independently of my having drafted this post several days ago. She writes on a translucent clamshell iBook. BRING BACK THE BLOBJECT. Zoey is obsessed with the LG Prada, which was the first smartphone with a capacitive touchscreen and is also obviously designer. Prada wasn’t the only fashion house to marry tech and design––Vivienne Tam collaborated with HP on a laptop covered in cherry blossoms in 2010. In her Depop listing, Mika Kol describes it as “an accessory you can go on Pinterest with.” I really like this “what’s in my bag” post where there’s an iPod Nano in an antique sterling silver chainmail clutch. It does the same thing as those behind the scenes photos of Kirsten Dunst smoking cigs and using her phone on the set of Marie Antoinette.
Britney Spears has this weirdly haunting and poignant song from 1999 called E-Mail My Heart. I really like this article about it, which points out that “email and online culture weren’t even that nascent in 1999…and yet the lyrics still make a bodge of the terminology.” I guess the Nora Ephron movie You’ve Got Mail, the first and best piece of media about falling in love on the Internet, was released the year prior. Not totally sure why I felt compelled to mention this, but I’m not building an argument here, I’m writing about vibes.
I’ve been really into Peli Greitzer’s scholarship lately. He does mathematics-inflected comparative literature. I don’t understand math at all, but I wish I did because its logic is so beautiful and gestures towards the existence of G-d. My word processor underlined G-d in red and it’s like, let me be pious. I am correct. Greitzer has this essay called A Theory of Vibe in which he writes about the vibe as analogous to an autoencoder algorithm, which I should stress again is not something I’m at all familiar with. He describes his schema as “this aesthetically accessible, surface-accessible, world-making structure as a mathematical substrate of what writer/musician Ezra Koenig (via Elif Batuman) describes as ‘vibe.’” He is circling around style. I feel as though I intuitively grasp the vibe of indie sleaze, and I’m frustrated that I can’t articulate it, or the material circumstances that brought it into being.
I was really struck by this post on X about this genre of music video set in an abandoned office, best exemplified by the Charli XCX 360 video. I can’t find the post now, but OP identified this trend as directly stemming from the abundance of unoccupied commercial spaces following the shift towards remote work post-pandemic. It seems so obvious, but it never would have occurred to me. What is the explanation for indie sleaze? That the people who are in their twenties now are simply nostalgic for the fashion and technology that belonged to adults when we were children? That these are the clothes that are available on the secondhand market?
The vibe that I’m nostalgic for, and we already see this happening with the reissue of the Jeffrey Campbell Lita, is Polyvore. Polyvore is this now defunct website where users could make shopable collages and moodboards pulling products from e-comm sites across the net. Polyvore was acquired by SSENSE and dissolved in 2018. Now everyone is Poly and Vore is a fetish for being consumed. Polyvore was about consumption too. I used it to window shop (in this case, the window of my browser) for clothes that Aria Montgomery from Pretty Little Liars would wear. Aria was the liar I identified with most strongly because she was brunette, bookish, and gothy, and I thought it was hot that she was having an affair with her dashing high school English teacher.
I figure I was probably using Polyvore around 2013-2015. This Internet Archive capture from January 18th, 2014 lists gunmetal jewelry, chevron bags, ombre jeans, tiered maxi skirts, jean jackets, and leopard print wedges among trending searches. Is this an indicator of trends that are going to cycle back soon? I still wince at the thought of this stuff. Bib necklaces? Galaxy-print leggings? Awful. I remember when I was into Aria Montgomery’s style I was very interested in epaulettes, a word I truly haven’t thought about in years. Aria wore this black, sequin, A-line dress with epaulettes to homecoming with strappy lace sandals and a singular lace glove.
I wanted to say that this was around the same time My Chemical Romance was in their Black Parade era, wearing goth marching band uniforms with epaulettes, but it turns out that was 2006. In any case, this fashion designer I loosely know, Riley High, posted that marching band jackets are going to make a comeback, so it’s probably true. Everyone should go buy something from Riley. I own this backless house dress she made and wore it to give some things (his copy of Bronze Age Mindset, an ashtray I made in ceramics class, a handwritten letter explaining my reasons for leaving) to my ex boyfriend when we were breaking up and it made him rest his hand on my lower back and then we had sex for the second to last time. This is an endorsement!