BRING BACK THE POSERS

Maybe Holden Caulfield was onto something when he called out the phonies.

Words by Zoe Glasser Art by Kodah Thompson

“My day as a Coquette girl.” “Get ready with me: indie girl edition.” “How I do my clean girl makeup.” Videos like this crop up all over my TikTok feed, and no amount of pressing the “not interested” button seems to make them go away. For every new trendy aesthetic whose head we culturally cut off, two more grow back; we dismantle the Hailey Bieber-fronted “clean girl” aesthetic as a whitewashed version of what Black women and Latinas have been wearing for years, and all of a sudden we have to start putting ribbons in our hair and coating our headphones in stickers. We shove the “cyber core” aesthetic aside as being “too 2020,” and suddenly Wednesday on Netflix makes it cool to be goth again. The internet has made it attractive and accessible to flip through trend cycles faster than a 13-year-old whose friends have convinced them to go to Hot Topic for the first time. While it’s not an issue to experiment with different clothing styles and interests to find what you like, there are more insidious issues lurking under the surface. First, these “aesthetics” are often culturally appropriative at best or straightup offensive at worst (seriously, how do we still need to remind people that dreamcatchers are a closed indigenous practice?). Secondly, they encourage overconsumption by preventing us from thinking about what we really like in favor of what we should like. And finally, these aesthetics have been reduced to fads that are based only on how you present to the public, stripping away any social or political context they once had and completely disregarding how much you actually participate in the lifestyle of the subculture. The point is how much you seem to match the aesthetic, rather than how much you actually see yourself in it. Back in my day (read: 2013), we had a name for this: posers.

To be called a poser was once the worst insult one could think of. It didn’t just mean try-hard, it meant fake. Inauthentic. Liar. It meant, “We see you for who you truly are, and we see that you don’t even know who that is.”

But there’s a major difference between today’s posers and the posers of the past. Posers were once simple clout-chasers, latching onto whatever subculture is cool right now and profiting off of it, but they have recently become manufactured. We can’t blame individuals for being posers anymore; how could we, when we’re constantly being bombarded with ads for Demonias and influencers selling us glass skin serum so we can fit the doll aesthetic — whatever that means?

Companies have discovered our desire to be affiliated with groups, and they’ve found that they can capitalize on that by selling you the most recent subculture in a bottle. Often, these will be pale imitations of the real thing: all the glory, none of the gore. So really, you aren’t choosing to be a poser. Corporations have commodified poserdom, and they’re selling it to you.

I mentioned the cultural appropriation in these watered-down subcultures — specifically, the controversy over the “clean girl” aesthetic. But if we really think about it, what was the clean girl aesthetic? It was wearing all white (sweating strictly prohibited), drinking “spa water” (which was actually just agua fresca), and... using soap? It meant nothing, it had no goals, and it was built to be sold.

Of course, being a member of a subculture and performing an aesthetic are different things. When you’re a member of a subculture, you align yourself with that subculture’s values and beliefs alongside visually fitting in. An aesthetic is simply a general style of dress that you can dip in and out of as you please with no real political or social affiliations. The problem begins when the boundaries between these start blurring; the clean girl aesthetic touts a unique lifestyle as if it were a subculture, but there are no real social beliefs to back it up.

Consider the goths. Goth as a subculture dates back to the 1980s and is associated with rock and synth music, death-related imagery, and a certain pessimistic mean streak. But the goth subculture is also heavily based on liberal and leftist politics. Most early goths were either allies to or members of the LGBTQ+ community at a time when it was not socially acceptable to be either. Although it is not known for its politics, it had (and has) a set of guiding values that separated the “real” goths from what they call “weekenders,” a.k.a. posers.

Removing the political and social elements out of these subcultures from their associated aesthetics takes the teeth off the movements. Likewise, punks existed to challenge the political status quo of American conservatism. Stripping them down to just wearing leather pants and studded jackets to create the “rockstar girlfriend aesthetic” also means erasing the work they did — however flawed it was — to create political change.

So how do we make sure we aren’t posers? Well, first of all, I want to re-emphasize that it’s wonderful to experiment with your style. You don’t need to be a part of a subculture to enjoy how they dress, and Jerk loves self-expression. But it’s also important to be aware of the ways that corporations are selling you these aesthetics and condition yourself not to throw your money at the first sparkly thing you see. Ask yourself if you really need that patchcoated jacket from Urban, and consider where the style inspiration came from before you buy those gold bamboo hoops. You’ll certainly save money and CO2 emissions by shopping less frequently for pieces you’ll wear more often. Plus, if we don’t give in to every single marketing tactic employed by Big Shein, it’ll send a signal that we are no longer interested in consuming watered-down aesthetics that will end up in a landfill in a few months.

So, the next time you feel tempted to give in to ads selling you the next hippie-girl aesthetic, listen to the tiny, angry 13-year-old on your shoulder telling you not to be a poser. By cultivating an authentic personal style, you will learn the antidote to poser-dom: personality.