What the fuck is an aesthetic???

(Thoughts from a nerd girl who did not peak in high school…)

Words and photos by Maggie Ruan (@maggienotmag)

What group did they place you in high school? High chance if you’re reading this article, it was the AP try-hards, or the kids who dressed weird, or neither and instead one of the many other clichés in teenage subculture.

High school culture is fragmented by essence. Which table do you sit at? The Nerds? The Athletes? The Rich Popular Kids? The Indie weirdos? It seems that each identity is segmented with its own jargon, culture, expectations, and uniform. Clothing is the ticket into each society. If you say the lines and dress the part, you’re in. 

The Nerd aesthetic, speaking from my experience, finds its congruency in incongruency. Random hoodies, sweats, t-shirts thrown together ten minutes before school starts because to care about your looks is superficial and is a waste of time my mom preaches to me.

The Popular Kids followed every digital culture wave. Riding the board as a whole and with ease: it was Brandy Melville baby tees and Vans, then scrunchies and Air Force Ones.

The Goth Kids religiously shopped at  Hot Topic. The Athletic Kids wore whatever they were going to wear to practice. And every other subgroup within my little SoCal high school bubble followed their team’s unspoken clothing rules.

But why does this matter? And why did it seem so unnatural and unnerving to float between different social circles? 

While I can’t speak for everyone in the proximity of my adolescent years, high school was not a place to form identity. The priority was to grind your way into college or else your life would be doomed. College was the telos, the pinnacle of life itself, and my acceptance into Berkeley was a token of my worth. Thus, I never gave myself the grace or the capacity to discover anything about myself at all. When you don’t have any sense of who you are, you begin to rely on external judgments for internal stability. This person’s shirt is weird, this person’s pants fit oddly. It seemed that the most insecure, unstable people always had the most to say, with myself as the greatest exhibit as I look in retrospect. 

But why limit ourselves?

In a 2026 Cosmopolitan interview, Zara Larsson stated, “If you, like, only listen to one music genre, then I don't think you're very smart”. I can’t help but really, really agree. Music, like clothing, is a medium for personal taste and expression. When you have no security in your own preferences, of course your judgments of others’ personal choices are amplified.

All of this is to say that there is a common trend in society I surmise will continue in the coming years. With the rise of trends, genres, aesthetics, and a startling stubbornness by the common people to defend or adhere to one, comes the inability to comprehend nuance. People cannot hold two truths to be valid at the same time. Society is lacking in critical opinions and the development of personal opinions. You can like this top from this aesthetic and the jewelry from this other one. You can like this rap song but also love this entire RnB album. And in a more advanced yet same way, you can hold the political truths of one party to be morally resonant, and one from another as well. We as a society are failing ourselves—shoving our complex minds and lives into both extremes of everything and every situation—we are dooming ourselves with ideological epileptic black and white—this is what we are doing.

We need to educate ourselves once more amidst this age of artificial autonomy. What do you like? What do you believe in? Ruminate, feel discomfort, dive deep into the many shades of grey in everything. The agency that makes humanity so great is fading away, and I fear that the patterns I’ve seen in the uniforms of our high school youth is a growing red flag.

And could I be overcomplicating all of this, like yeah. But at the very least, I have a message that is applicable for each generation, each person in this age.

Dare to be ugly. Dare to be wrong! Dare to dress in a way that makes people scoff! Listen to music other people can only feel disdain for! Educate yourself on what you care about! Allow for the juxtaposition between the norm that society has fabricated and your truest desires. Embrace the multifacetedness of being human in every way available. Life is rich and vibrant, so f*ck a genre! 

Eat richly! Love deeply! And dress how you feel!