TikTok's New 'It' Aesthetic Trend Is a '90s Deep Cut

It's a Monday morning in 1997, and you're on your way to begin another week at your very glamorous, very prestigious job in fashion PR.

Before you arrive at your office — one that's parked on the 36th floor of a glossy, sun-soaked tower in Midtown Manhattan — you have to swing by a photoshoot for an upcoming collection. It's a good thing the loft you just bought (with a 20-percent down payment, of course) is mere blocks from the studio space. Because, in this fantasy, you can indeed afford Tribeca real estate, as well as a closet of immaculately tailored Prada and Calvin Klein. You never get hungover after happy hour, and the 6 train is never late.

Welcome to "Gen-X Soft Club," a hyper-specific design aesthetic that's beginning to take TikTok by storm.

First coined by Sloane Angel Hilton of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI), an online community dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera from the 1970s until now, Gen-X Soft Club refers to a natural, gentler approach to the Y2K era's often-glittery futurism that emerged and declined in a seven year period, between 1996 and 2002, and represented a rejection of the blingy, cyber-obsessed aesthetic that became dominant during the same period.

So, what does it look like? Futuristic fonts, metropolitan imagery, uncomplicated sartorial minimalism; cool green, blue or gray color schemes. Fashion and beauty elements are deliberately understated, with air-dried hair resting atop mock turtlenecks. Once you know how to identify it, you may just begin spotting it everywhere: on the runways, in the campaigns, on album covers.

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Gen Z, for one, is already on board. Evan Collins, an architect and CARI's lead curator, explains that the demographic is fascinated by the escapism Gen-X Soft Club represents — after all, Gen Z is the most "depressed, anxious, and fragile" generation ever, with housing, climate and financial crises coalescing to form one giant, ominous cloud lurking over the future in both the short and near terms. It harks back to a simpler time: pre-9/11 (mostly), pre-Great Recession, pre-COP summit. The late 1990s weren't perfect, but they were markedly less online, and that alone feels aspirational.

"There was this sense of calm and prosperity, and an exuberance about the future," says Collins. "Gen-X Soft Club is not so wildly over-the-top like Y2K, and it's not generating these sort of crazy visions of the future. It's a lot more grounded in reality. You're progressing into the new millennium, but in this very sleek, restrained, sophisticated sort of manner."

When Amsterdam-based data analyst Molly Rooyakkers first posted about Gen-X Soft Club on TikTok in August, she wasn't anticipating it would gain the momentum it has. At the time of her original video, the "#genxsoftclubaesthetic" had just 15,000 views worldwide, a figure that's now up to 504,000 less than four months later. A follow-up video, which she posted in October, has since been viewed nearly 55,000 times.

According to Rooyakkers, Gen-X Soft Club offers its subscribers something more than a kind of escapist cosplay: As fashion increasingly turns to minimalism, some may go the way of the Sofia Richie-esque "Quiet Luxury," while others may gravitate toward a more undone, Carolyn Besstte-Kennedy-adjacent style.

"I've seen all the '90s minimalist influences [being worn] with a bit of an indie sleaze [edge], with messy hair and smudge-y makeup, and I thought [Gen-X Soft Club] would be super relevant given where we are in fashion," says Rooyakkers. "We're turning to minimalism, but not everyone is going to be the 'Quiet Luxury' clean girl. [Gen-X Soft Club] is presented as a grungier, touch-grass take on minimalism."

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In practice, Gen-X Soft Club is closely aligned with a number of trending aesthetics, from the aforementioned '90s-perfect minimalism to something called "Businesscore," the corporate wares of which were featured prominently throughout the Fall 2023 collections of brands like Saint Laurent, Versace, Alexander McQueen, Proenza Schouler and Dior. Miu Miu, in particular, has been a driving force, with its viral pinstripe trousers helping to transform once-snoozy office-ready staples into capital-F fashion darlings.

Gen-X Soft Club is not all about workwear, however. Unlike other digital micro-cores — like the breezy septuagenarians of "Coastal Grandmother" or the countryside townsfolk of "Cottagecore" — Gen-X Soft Club is more of a vibe to be recognized than a prescription to be followed. Outside of fashion, contemporary examples run the gamut from entertainment to advertising.

Take the track art for Dua Lipa's recent single, "Houdini," which features a 2000s-style, sans-serif font atop a soft, filtered visual that looks, perhaps, as if the camera lens had been smeared with Vaseline. Emma Chamberlain embraces the aesthetic, too, in Chamberlain Coffee's transit-set campaign for the company's new canned lattes. And then there's Kathryn Bernardo's aqua-tinged, frosty-eyed cover of Preview's November 2023 issue, in which the Filipino actor even sports a sharp pixie cut à la 1990s icon Princess Diana.

But it's 2023, not the 1990s, which means that Gen-X Soft Club may just serve as yet another blip in the ever-churning fashion trend cycle. It's what we've seen with the stable of aesthetics, cores and microtrends — like "Stealth Wealth," "Barbiecore" and "Tomato-Girl Summer" — that have come to define the last 12 months.

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For Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox covering social platforms and the creator economy, this never-ending quest to name the next "It" aesthetic is more interesting than the actual aesthetics themselves.

"Users are digging into digital archives, trying to pull out images that feel of-the-moment (or perhaps of-the-next-moment) and announce their trend predictions," she says. "The sport of naming the next thing is almost more important than what the thing actually is."

That may be so, but Jennings is insistent: The Gen-X Soft Club era and its ilk aren't going anywhere, whether they're marketed with a zippy name or not.

"I think the late 1990s and early 2000s will forever be a wellspring of inspiration in fashion and beauty, particularly in online spaces, because it was the first time people were becoming acquainted with the internet," says Jennings. "These are the earliest images we have of cool, online young people, and it set the tone for everything to come."

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