This, unfortunately, is how the sausage is made. My mother texted and asked if “people were being mean to me online”. The time difference mercifully meant I was asleep when the initial wave of trend scepticism and bewilderment convulsed through Twitter. This time round, I was in Los Angeles for the Frieze art fair. When the normcore article came out, I was giving a presentation on New York’s nightlife crisis – uncomfortably ignoring the vibrating phone in my pocket. Similarly, New York magazine had published an article that made the term mainstream. I was part of the trend-forecasting collective K-Hole that authored the original trend report on normcore. In January 2022, six months after coining the term, I was approached by New York magazine for a piece about the vibe shift. Musically – well, I’ve already made my prediction: it’ll be a return of rock.” The players are personalities more interested in the literary than the artistic, more interested in the who follows, than the how many followers. I described the vibe shift as: “A return to scene culture, elements of ‘naughty aughties’ nostalgia. Millennials went into lockdown still feeling young, but they came out shocked to find the first cohort of Zoomers now ruling the roost. If the vibe shift felt more disjunctive than usual, our inability to experience street life for more than a year was probably the culprit. Covid at last had a vaccine and predictions of a “ hot vax summer” peppered the US media. The idea of a vibe shift was very much informed by the late spring of 2021. Much to the chagrin of my clients – I’m a trend forecaster – my methodology is more instinctual than factual. You know them when you see them – you just have to have your pattern recognition goggles on. Why does something feel in or out of style? Why does one cultural object feel representative of an era while another doesn’t? The US supreme court judge Potter Stewart refused to define obscenity, saying in 1964 rather: “I know it when I see it.” Trends are a bit like this. This sense of timeliness is, ultimately, what I was referring to when I coined the term “vibe shift” in an article on my Substack in June 2021.
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