Towards a Taxonomy of Fashion Aesthetics
Fashion aesthetics enter our lives through radically different genealogies. Some originate in art history or cultural movements; others emerge from architecture, interior design, or material culture before migrating onto the bodies we dress. Commercial aesthetics arise from mass market articulation, where the industry’s chosen vocabularies are popularized through the attention economy’s restless churn. Still others, particularly TikTok and internet aesthetics, crystallize through social media’s trend cycles and algorithms.
Clothes function as wearable technology, embodying aesthetics and operating as visual language for self-expression. Fashion represents a crucial site of aesthetic (re-)production, developing and extending new aesthetic vocabularies on the singular premise of wearability. Unlike music, art, or other expressive forms that require active encounter, fashion constitutes a pervasive, quotidian aesthetic practice: everyone gets dressed every day. This positions fashion as distinct from other aesthetic mediums, by making the body itself the site of continuous aesthetic practice.
We take fashion seriously as a realm of artistic and cultural production, attending to the specific constraints and affordances of this medium, echoing what Anne Hollander calls fashion’s unique “visual grammar” that operates through cloth, body, and movement. Our methodology prioritizes descriptive precision. This series of analyses attempt to parse aesthetics as they are. The work of naming comes first; description and interpretation follows.
Fashion history is a history of circulation. Aesthetic ideas move across time, geography, religion, and mediums. They are adopted, adapted, commercialized, reinterpreted, and sometimes misunderstood. This methodology aims to document those movements carefully, with attention to naming, attribution, and lineage.
Naming as Documentation
The act of naming an aesthetic is also an act of framing. Choosing whether to call something “streetwear,” “hip-hop style,” or a specific subcultural term shapes how it is understood and remembered. As Wittgenstein’s language games suggest, naming defines the limits of what can be described (Philosophical Investigations, 1953). Berger and Luckmann note that categories transform lived experience into recognizable social forms (The Social Construction of Reality, 1966). This process is both necessary and imperfect: without names, patterns remain diffuse; with names, they become stable enough to study.
Cultural theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Dick Hebdige have shown that naming and classification can also reshape or obscure origins. In fashion, subcultural styles often migrate into mainstream discourse, sometimes losing context in the process. Our approach is not to adjudicate who may or may not wear something, but to trace how styles travel and to document where they first cohered as recognizable systems.
We therefore adopt two guiding commitments. First, to present aesthetic history with contextual clarity, acknowledging when styles emerged from particular communities, scenes, or conditions. Second, to document how those styles evolved as they moved into broader circulation, including commercial reinterpretations. The goal is historical accuracy and descriptive completeness.
Six Principles:
- Notability. We require verifiable evidence that an aesthetic is sufficiently established to merit documentation. Both primary and secondary sources are used.
- Source diversity. We triangulate across firsthand documentation, media artifacts, archival material, journalism, and scholarship to construct reliable accounts of origin and development.
- Neutrality. Entries maintain a descriptive tone. The aim is to clarify how aesthetics function, not to prescribe cultural positions.
- Lineage tracing. We identify clear genealogies and transformation points, documenting how one aesthetic evolves into another across time.
- Temporal relevance. Priority is given to aesthetics that retain contemporary relevance or have demonstrable historical continuity.
- Descriptive richness. Entries use precise garment terminology, construction vocabulary, and material specificity to create replicable visual understanding.
All aesthetic names are posthumous names. Baroque artists did not self-identify as baroque; indie sleaze practitioners did not call themselves indie sleaze. We look back and periodize, gathering scattered practices under labels that creatives themselves never used. Retrospective naming is not a failure of method but its condition: aesthetic vocabulary emerges from the work of seeing patterns across time and making those patterns legible through language.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory of fiction” offers a model for understanding this process. Writing against the linear, hero’s-journey narrative arc, Le Guin proposed fiction as a carrier bag: a technology for gathering, holding, bringing things home together. Aesthetic taxonomy operates similarly. It gathers dispersed visual instances, and carries them together into provisional coherence. We understand naming as an act of speculation and construction. Through naming, we make a claim about what connects these scattered practices, what allows them to be understood as variations on a shared grammar.
This retrospective gathering is simultaneously fiction and documentation. When we name an aesthetic, we retrofit coherence onto phenomena. For instance, we borrow the term “brutalism” and apply it to fashion, gathering references of concrete, architectural severity, naming geometric silhouettes and exposed seams. We construct that coherence by identifying shared formal properties and tracing them to common cultural-historical conditions. The fiction creates vocabulary where none existed, enabling recognition and analysis of visual patterns that were previously unnamed.
We welcome new terms. First, we actively coin neologisms when gaps exist in the aesthetic vocabulary, when we observe coherent visual patterns with no adequate existing language. Second, we legitimate terms emerging from internet and subcultural discourse when they demonstrate stability, specificity, and genuine descriptive utility.
This approach treats aesthetic vocabulary as a living, expanding system rather than a closed taxonomy. The goal is not comprehensive coverage of all possible aesthetics but the creation of precise, useful language for visual patterns that matter. Every name we introduce is a carrier bag, gathering instances into provisional stability.
While we actively coin terms when we observe coherent visual patterns, we also welcome ideas from our broader community. Practitioners, designers, collectors, stylists, and attentive observers often recognize emerging aesthetics before they reach academic or journalistic documentation. Community proposals help keep this taxonomy responsive to living culture, not just retrospective analysis.
At the same time, not every micro-trend needs a permanent name. Our goal is clarity, not proliferation. When considering new entries, we look for aesthetics that demonstrate coherence, cultural presence, and descriptive usefulness. The review process is designed to preserve the taxonomy’s rigor while remaining open to thoughtful expansion.
Submission Guidelines
If you’d like to propose a new aesthetic entry, we ask for the following:
- Aesthetic name. Provide the proposed term. Indicate whether this is (a) a term you are coining, (b) emerging subcultural vocabulary, or (c) internet-native terminology. Briefly explain why this name is useful — what visual patterns it identifies that existing vocabulary does not.
- Definition paragraph. Write 4–7 sentences outlining the aesthetic’s essential character: what it is, where and when it emerged (or currently flourishes), who participates in it, and how it relates to adjacent aesthetics.
- Visual evidence. Submit 3–5 representative images that demonstrate the aesthetic’s coherence. The images should show variation while maintaining clear visual relationships that justify grouping them under a single term.
- Evidence of cultural presence. Provide documentation that the aesthetic has achieved recognizable circulation. This might include media coverage, social media activity, designer or brand adoption, retail categorization, or secondary discussion. For internet-native aesthetics, evidence of stability across more than one trend cycle is especially helpful.
- Provisional history. Outline known origins, key milestones, and relevant communities. This does not need to be exhaustive; it simply helps determine whether sufficient material exists to support a full entry.
Proposals can be sent to yeng (at) lekondo.com. We look forward to your submissions!