the boom boom aesthetic
an old look for a new age—
In Live Players, I wrote about how money was the last unifying value among Americans, especially young Americans. The recent Axios survey on how different generations define success monetarily corroborates this:
For Zoomers, money represents agency. Unlike Millennials, who graduated into the Great Recession and were influenced by their parents’ progressive sentimentalism, Gen Z was not raised by Boomers still misty about the social revolutions of the sixties and seventies. The substitution of purpose for payment, the maneuver most companies employed in the cash-strapped post-crash economy, simply doesn’t work when you grew up in the age of crypto and the Kardashians.
What values do influencers represent?
Why do people create memecoins?
the cryptorich blew out influencer aesthetics
There’s blowing up—and then there is blowing out. Like all nouveau riche before them, the cryptorich took the aesthetics of the 2010s to their logical conclusion. Just as Donald Trump was often said to be a poor man’s idea of what a rich person looks like, Andrew Tate is an incel’s idea of what a chad looks like. He drives flash cars. His collection includes Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Rolls Royces, Astin Martins, and a custom copper Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport valued at 5.2 million dollars. He lives in Dubai on Palm Jumeirah in a property worth 100 million dollars, though the price tag remains unconfirmed. He wears ill-fitting Balenciaga t-shirts by day and ill-fitting shark suits by night.
And yet for all its ostentation, something is lacking. Like all influencer aesthetics, it feels flat. Minimalist mansions so minimal they look like tombs, supercars so super they look fit for a superhero. (The new Jaguar designs look like an iridescent Barbie Batmobiles.) The point is to know how much it costs, not to care how it looks.
It’s not style. It’s a spreadsheet.
As I pointed out in my diagram about the Triad of Capital, the point of money is to acquire taste and status. Cultural capital legitimizes financial capital i.e. to complement wealth’s hard power with sophistication’s soft power. At Bitcoin Miami, I remember seeing someone with a large Louis Vuitton bag whose monogram was backlit with shimmering rainbow LEDs, which must have been exhumed from the Grailed abyss.
It was the death of streetwear encapsulated in object form. A pure expression of excess, a pricetag larping as a fashion accessory.
We grope for something more. You see this desire in the #oldmoney hashtag, the TikTok era’s answer to Robin Leach’s iconic television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. While still tacky, it understands money indeed can buy you class.
We want money to mean something more.
very boom boom
It all began with Hyundai’s 2021 Heritage Series Grandeur. A restomod (restored+modified) celebrating the manufacturer’s 1986 flagship sedan, it has a neutro (new+retro) aesthetic, parametric pixel headlights on a boxy hood, an electric powertrain and a cigar storage compartment. In a car market defined by premium mediocre ‘everything-looks-the-same’ designs for the masses and statement supercars for the .01%, the concept car stands out for its subtlety and its distinction. You might think it was a beater as it passed. Only the interior’s digital display, infinity mirrors and bronze ambient lighting give it away.
Lighting is key with boom boom aesthetics. See: Daniel Boulud’s new restaurant La Tête d’Or. The New York neo-deco steakhouse avoids Trumpian gilding in favor of a lamplit interior, bathed in a golden glow. (For non-francophones, La Tête d’Or means ‘the golden head’ in French.) Part of the citywide post-COVID steakhouse boom. Other noted entries include the reopening of American-staple Delmonico’s and Paris-import Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte. According to The Post, meat supplies cited a 10-15% increase in demand since the pandemic.
Along with the rise of bromikase restaurants—brash, finance-targeted interpretations of classic chef-crafted, prix-fixe sushi bars—and the return of the piano bar (Bemelman’s renaissance, The Nines, Hell’s Kitchen’s new So & So’s), New York in 2024 has a very eighties feel, right down to the social dysfunction in full view on every street corner. Even writing this much about restaurants feels very eighties. The overlit, Instagram-friendly vegan fast-casual spot dishing out customized ingredients in recycled cardboard bowls—or as my friend Amelia once called them, “civilized troughs”—is over. It’s but a twee memory of times past.
It’s all a bit fusty, which may be the point. Fustiness is a complex flavor. It requires a certain level of refinement and understanding to appreciate. We see this revealed in a recent New Yorker review of Le Veau d’Or (en français ‘the golden calf’), New York’s oldest French restaurant, recently revived by Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr, the pair behind popular brasseries Franchette and the neo-deco Le Rock:
Despite being facelifted and spit-shined, it remains anachronistic, backward-looking, obsessed with its own history. It’s one of the coolest restaurants I’ve been to in ages.
The fetishization of the past is very boom boom.
We see this in the return of the suit, especially in double-breasted and fuller-fitting, pleated cuts; the return of the loafer and the Oxford shoe (see: Miu Miu’s recent collaboration with storied Northamptonshire cobbler’s Church’s); the return of blockbuster, cultural touchstone boxing matches like the recent Tyson-Paul Netflix fight. Hierarchy, tradition, aggression—male-coded values people thought had been left in the dustbin of history. All have come roaring back.
Poolsuite was the first brand to lock onto this shift. The web3-native parent company behind Vogue’s favorite sunscreen, Vacation, understands the difference between sex and sexiness. Poolsuite, which grew out of an Instagram moodboard, bases its vibes on bikinis, beaches, cigarette boats, jet skis, and Miami. It’s not explicit. It’s implicit. After all, seduction is predicated on calculated withholding. This affect has regained popularity in the age of OnlyFans, where the only thing difficult to find on an internet awash in porn is coquettish withholding.
While Vacation’s custom ads features hardbodies—presumably using the product—Poolsuite markets its umbrella brand with innuendo. Copy reads, “Lloyd Palmer is never late to get in early.” “Shirley Goodwin doesn’t just clock out, she powers down.” “Show the world that you mean business.” “Poolsuite: The Future of Leisure & Commerce.”
Boom boom aesthetics yearn for a reinstitution boundaries between work and play. We see this in the current fixation on sports that require gear: The North Face x SKIMS ski collection, Hermès equestrian looks taking centerstage at Vogue World, the slew of Malbon golf collaborations (Bushmills, UNDEAFETED, Dockers, the LA Rams), and Antibes luxury property Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc's tennis capsule collection with Lacoste.
To return to the theme of light, while evening leisure has a warm, amber hue, the image of sport only ever appears in its idealized form: on a sunny day, under the bright blue sky, regardless of if it occurs on the slope or in the sand.
On the work front, we see a third light-quality—the dim glow of the evening office. Circadian-rhythm disrupting blue LEDs, crystal displays, and compressed fluorescents are swapped for the banker lamp green of Matrix-style CRTs. The biology-confounding glow of our screens fool our brains into thinking night has never fallen, that business hours occur 24/7.
You can recreate a boundary by turning off the lights.
Creative director Owen John posted a series of photographs that demonstrate this aesthetic in a workplace, a home, and a private jet—over-stuffed black leather office chairs, dark wood desks, counters, and paneling, crushed velvet, gold accents, crystal, parlor palms—and a question: what are we calling this aesthetic? The tweet went mildly viral, racking up 2.6 million views in a matter of days. Answers included: Gordon Deco, corporate-raider-core, martini noir, and Midjourney 80s penthouse. The last is less a neologism and more a statement of fact.
I tested whether or not the images were AI slop, as we’re now calling it. Two out of three were. It’s interesting to consider images which feel old, but are in fact new. Is this anemoia, the yearning for a past we never knew? Its hard to say. It’s an example of an archival look—a topic I covered previously—the use of AI to create something new from the aesthetics of the old.
More examples of this aesthetic can be found on the TikTok @liminaldestinations, among others. Almost all are spaces fit for a Bret Easton Ellis character.
supervillain vibes
Patrick Bateman comes up over and over again as a touchstone for this look. But he’s not the only anti-hero in the mix. Think Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Gavin Newsom, even Don Draper is a fit if we tailor his suits a bit. None of these characters are heroes in a traditional sense. (Even Newsom is only entertained by Democrats as a means to an end: they bemoan his sleazy-white-maleness.) Their popularity tends to confound both writers and critics alike.
They are supposed to be villains.
Why are they treated like heroes?
To go back to the beginning of this post, the sixties sentimentality held by Boomers and inherited by Millennials is fogging our vision. The hippie isn’t the rebel or the revolutionary. The hippie is your principal, the hippie is your boss, the hippie is your government. What in the Sixties would be referred to as ‘The Man’ or ‘The Establishment’ is the outsider perspective in 2024.
Without going too deep in the meta-politics of this, the perils of overindulging sixties sentimentality is already a topic for Democratic centrists. Ezra Klein’s forthcoming book Abundance, co-authored by Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Positioned against degrowth, a trend I’ve seen touted in plenty of decks, Klein and Thompson make the argument that progressives can’t win on a platform of less: less housing, less healthcare, less cars, less energy, less clothes, less meat.
Austerity is the business of autocrats. No one votes for their life to get worse. I came across a thread that makes the case clearly enough that I won’t bother. It begins:
leftists need to become technoutopian maximalists because currently the “vision” being sold for a post decolonial/imperial world is a degrowth one in which nobody has fruit out of season, clothes are washed by hand, nobody trades internationally and restaurants no longer exist
You can read the rest here.
The eighties archival look that defines the boom boom aesthetic is certainly maximalist in its appetites. Its work hard, play hard ethos presumes an abundance agenda i.e. the money earned working funds consumption while playing. After a decade of executives dressing like interns (normcore), touting anti-growth platitudes (degrowth), while smartphones enabled the total dissolution of work/life boundaries (email jobs), is it any wonder the youth find inspiration in the glamour of the past?
