For those of you who don’t know, an aesthetic, as defined by Google, is “a set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement.” We are the artists and our public image is our canvas.
Having an aesthetic is great. It’s even fun; sorting through hair colors, clothes, music, and Twitter headers to construct an ideal self. It makes you feel in control of how people perceive you.
But, when that girl from your statistics class wears a Rolling Stones’ Hot Lips tee from some mass-producing outlet store, she is representing decades of counterculture and anti-authoritarian attitudes without even knowing it. And there lies the issue.
As a culture, we worship everything blindly because we’re promised that it will make us cool. We’re too lazy to actually discover the value in materials.
Impressionable girls appropriate henna tattoos that they can pair with their Jimi Hendrix shirt and tribal headwrap while Muslim women in Afghanistan use mendhi as a sign of coming of age. “Hippie kids” plaster their walls with Woodstock posters because they like that one song by The Who, but fail to realize that Pete Townshend wrote ‘Baba O’Riley’ about the mental dissolution of drugged-out teens who attended the festival.
But who cares, right? It makes them look cool.
However, people believe these principles set them apart from others; thus, they worship these principles because it provides an edgy façade, not because they’re actually passionate about Islamic culture or Pete Townshend’s cynicism. As a result, we glorify appearances and disavow substance.
I don’t think that girl from your stats class is a poser. She’s just caught up in the aesthetic guidelines that we follow for social gratification.
But here’s the catch, you don’t have to pretend to like classic rock or own a Polaroid camera to get people to like you.
