This is an experiment. 

Have you ever stumbled upon a blog or Instagram page where every post seems like it's hand-picked from a "What's the Dopest Shit Out Right Now" editorial? Like, they have the right mix of mainstream and underground brands, disinterested looking multi-ethnic people with curly hair posing in front of cosmopolitan architecture, celebrity street candids, pop culture artifacts, super tasteful interior design, and art stuff.

If your answer is no, look no further: Lewis.Apon, HypeBeast, Street Etiquette, The Fader, High Snobiety, Virgil Abloh, Ronnie Fieg, Ill Roots

You've probably seen some derivative of this stuff in your internet escapades. And then you close your laptop and venture out into the urban frontier of Hipsterdom (The term "Hipster" may be close to retirement, but then again, the Hippie never really died, it just aged.). As buildings and neighborhoods are reclaimed by artists, art buyers, and yuppies with a thirst for being special, people and places are transformed. From storefronts to style choices, everything just looks cooler. 

Whether HypeBeast or Hipster, there's this image of being in the know and belonging to a special class of enlightened others. Whether embracing or forsaking mainstream content, there's this effort to look effortlessly cool. This is the trendy aesthetic. 

To be candid, I'm enchanted by it. I love consuming it and wishing I could live the lifestyle, despite knowing that I'm chasing something relatively insubstantial. The aesthetic is just a representation. It doesn't signify any character trait beyond an appreciation of beauty and excellence.  It doesn't fully capture a person's value or contribution to society. Often times, those who master it use it as a veil for insecurity or superficiality. Nonetheless, I'm I'm drawn to it and so are other people. Culture follows it's gravitational pull, selecting memes that symbolize status, belonging, taste, knowledge, and desire. The content changes with time, but our relationship to it persists. So why not use this heuristic for the purposes of this platform: "If it looks cool, it must be valuable." 

Not everything fits this logic. Still, we find ourselves adopting many of the markers of this aesthetic in language, listening, look, and lust. People change the way they talk, what they buy, what they eat, what they read, where they travel, who and what they vote for, and more in an attempt to go with or against the trend. Other's don't care. They float along in their own personal or local culture without any awareness or direction other than maintaining it. Nonetheless, they are influenced. No one in society can truly separate themselves from their context. The aesthetic still works on them.

How does the trendy aesthetic work?

It inspires identification. It makes you want to be "that" too. That version of cool, or at least to find your own version and wear it so powerfully that others want to be it. 

It creates perceived value. Such is the story of gentrification. "If artists are moving to this neighborhood now, it must be a hip place to live."

It influences behavior. Gluten-free diets. Dad Hats. Rapping with triplet flows. You get it. We eat, dress, make playlists, and spend money based on this stuff.

That said, the experiment is to use the trendy aesthetic as a strategy to make this platform look beautiful, capture attention, and lead readers to paradigm shifting content. 

Here's the catch. I'm attempting to appeal to two groups: people who want to look cool, and people seeking personal transformation. Let's see if there's a niche somewhere in the overlap.