Scrolling through Instagram is a joyless way to pass the time. It’s all just bronzed clavicles, boob “art”, and wammin in bustiers elegantly yet also sloppily slurping spaghetti in an al fresco setting, all with captions begging the viewer, “do not perceive me.”
I’m very over it.
Nothing has accelerated this aesthetic burnout for me more than the storied Lisa Says Gah! aesthetic. (We know how I feel about unnecessary exclamation points.) Don’t know what it is? Lucky. You probably don’t follow any nouveau-basic wammin on the internet, because in my corner, this phenomenon is near ubiquitous.
Slightly askew checkerboard patterns, cow print, fruit, granny squares, etc. adorn any and everything in the LSG universe. Ella Emhoff, eat your heart out: it’s a “Bedford L stop” meets “LA Moon Juice Gal,” Memphis-meets-MICA. Miss Lippy, the kindergarten teacher from Billy Madison, is the patron saint. It harkens back to the Tumblr Lolitas-in-sailor-fukus era but with more benzos and ketamine, and without any modicum of artistic expression or self awareness. It’s an emperor’s new clothes situation but instead of the emperor being fully naked, he just looks like a damn fool. It’s somehow derivative while being brand new.
I don’t like it one bit.
It’s tacky, but what I really don’t like where this is all going: the petite bourgeoisie clamoring to influence the conspicuous consumption that’s feeding the algorithms and shaping our monoculture in a way that should be concerning. I’m not going so far as to accuse all of us as becoming pastel-clad sheeple, but I do think that we should take a look at how these common aesthetics have come to be, and what the larger implications could be. Do we like LSG? Or do we just see it over and over again? (I’m inclined to say the latter because the psychology of envy or FOMO has been proven to drive consumerism.)
I vividly remember when Instagram began catching on as a photo-sharing platform, much to photographers’ chagrin. Between the compression, the small size, and the square ratio, the format took previously eye-catching images and made them so… blah? (Which, I believe, may be the opposite of what’s intended by the word, “gah.”) It didn’t take long though for artists to adapt: what came to be was a much flatter kind of image, and thus the original “Instagram aesthetic” was born. It was much more rugged back then, but the idea was still the same: create content to be absorbed by the algorithm and spread back out to the masses. After all, what is art if no one sees it? But what happens when this trend continues outside of our feeds?
Less than a decade later, here we are: restaurants are creating Insta-worthy vignettes in an effort to rouse patrons to do their marketing for them, hotels are confining themselves to this monocultural ideal of what people like to see when they’re doing their daily escapism scrolling, otherwise attractive wammin are defiling themselves with garish prints because the algorithm tells them that this is what the cool girls do. It seems that for quite some time, we have been blurring the lines between our lives online and our lives offline. (The IRL.) We’re creating a well-lit, clean, aesthetically-relevant world for ourselves, a vacuum of consumption built to serve capital. I can still remember a world before the algorithms that are designed to keep us online longer and inspire a purchase or two—but it seems that many do not. Digital natives don’t know anything outside of this. Experiential marketing is an innate concept. There was never a distinction between the “online” and the “offline”—it was always just… life.
For me, it’s one thing for internet aesthetics to stay on the internet, but what about when they begin to shape the world around us and contribute to an aesthetic and ideological monoculture? It’s less about Lisa Says Gah! and more about the terrifying influence of algorithmic advertising, the psychological impact of repetition, and the power of a few wammin with a spare chunk of change to purchase some clown pants.