This is what an average email inbox of someone even remotely interested in contemporary culture looks like in 2023. (For the sake of transparency, this is taken from my own “promotions” and “updates” folders.)

“#Mermaidcore takes over, with the trend surging across runways, red carpets, and movie screens as consumers look to connect with the magic of the ocean” 

“Indie Sleaze King celebrating the release of his The Sex - EP”

“In Defense of Disney’s Strange Solarpunk World”

That’s a lot of buzzwords, with a series of suffixes doing the heavy lifting. The current internet landscape loves aestheticizing and taxonomizing whatever subject they’re dealing with, and suffixes abound. There’s cottageCORE, seaPUNK, vaporWAVE, and ballerinaSLEAZE. Subcultures have always been a part of internet communities, and platforms from Tumblr to TikTok have honored and covered every special interest, mood, hobby, like, dislike, and aesthetic. 

But these suffixes can seem interchangeable at first, and trying to pinpoint in what context they first sprang up only goes so far in narrowing down their meaning. “The idea of people having an ’aesthetic’ is some new stupid 2010s internet shit,” claims a jaded redditor in r/outoftheloop. “It's kids who learned a $5 word and now need to use it to, once again, try to give themselves some credentials.”  On the Midjourney subreddit, one user prompted the AI program to create images based on various -punk and -core aesthetics, sometimes swapping suffixes around, with barely noticeable differences.

Which begs the question, posed by @acegiak on Twitter: “So if applying suffixes like "-core" "-punk" and "-wave" is about aestheticising their subject, is there any other difference between these suffixes or is "cottagecore" actually the same as "cottagepunk" and "cottagewave" and we just pick whichever sounds best?” 

There are some distinctions. While most of the -wave subcultures specifically play on early digital spaces and 1980s nostalgia in terms of sight and sound, -punks and -cores started off as polar opposites that now sometimes meet in the middle. 

Punk: From Genre Fiction to Subculture (and Back)

The suffix -punk is associated with the most robust subcultures, including cyberpunk, steampunk, and solarpunk—and can be traced back to early 1980s genre fiction. 

Bruce Bethke wrote a short story called “Cyberpunk” in 1980, and the term was soon adopted by Gardner Dozois, the editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, to describe a futuristic technological dystopia. “About the closest thing here to a self-willed esthetic ‘school’ would be the purveyors of bizarre hard-edged, high-tech stuff, who have on occasion been referred to as ‘cyberpunks,’” Dozois wrote in The Washington Post in 1984. 

Three years later, the genre magazine Locus published a letter by author K.W. Jeter that read, in part: “Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term. Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps.” 

By the end of the millennium, cyberpunk and steampunk had evolved into full-fledged subcultures. Movies like The Matrix (1999) and the scenes set on the planet Coruscant in the Star Wars prequels (1999-2003) fully embody the ethos of cyberpunk, furthering it with a distinct fashion and color palette. Both the original Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) also have a markedly cyberpunk aesthetic. Y2K fashion also embraced the aesthetic: The red patent leather, skin-tight jumpsuit Britney Spears wore in the 2000 single “Oops! I Did it Again” is pure cyberpunk. Today, any jewel-toned patent leather item immediately screams cyberpunk.

Similarly, steampunk flourished in the early 2000s, when artifacts like the Steampunk Laptop by Datamancer went viral and the fashion label Steampunk Couture launched. Prada went steampunk for their Fall 2012 menswear collection, which featured capes, textured fabrics, and double-breasted jackets in a rich color palette. 

Twenty years later, both aesthetics remain popular. On TikTok, #steampunk has 632.1M views; #cyberpunk 4.7B views. Both steampunk and cyberpunk have inspired movies and games that fully reference the subcultures. The movie Mortal Engines (2018) and the tv show Carnival Row (2019) are canonically steampunk. Cyberpunk 2077 is an action role-playing video game that takes place in a cyberpunk universe, where you control a mercenary who has been implanted with a cybernetic device that threatens to overwrite his personality with one of a deceased celebrity.

Both steampunk and cyberpunk carry markedly anti-capitalist and anti-establishment agendas, with the good guys routinely fighting against the reigning power structure and technocracy. By contrast, the newer solarpunk (est. 2010) represents the harmony between nature and technology, heavily inspired by Afrofuturism. Wakanda, from Black Panther (2018) is a solarpunk country, as is Avalonia in Disney’s 2022 feature Strange World.

Newer -punk subcultures like sandalpunk (Grecoroman antiquity + technology) steelpunk (cloak and dagger + technology) and silkpunk (medieval Middle-Eastern and Eastern style signifiers + technology) all employ the combination of technology plus a past historical context, which, given the sci-fi precedent set by steampunk, strikes a dystopian tone. 

Cores: From IRL to Theory

-Cores are based on deduction: you observe something and make a trend out of it. We can trace our obsessions with -cores back to 2013, when trend forecasting agency K Hole coined the term normcore. 

Myriad other -cores followed, to varying degrees of absurdity (clowncore??). Cottagecore, perhaps the most famous core that came to dominate the 2020 zeitgeist, was first mentioned on Tumblr in 2018. It encompasses fashion (billowy, pastoral-inspired garments), interior decoration (a focus on shabby-chic wood, 80s florals, coziness), and cuisine (with an emphasis on cultivating your own produce and baking your own bread).

Now, -cores are confined to home and fashion, and influenced by movie releases and periodic waves of nostalgia, among other things. This year, for example, is marked by Barbiecore and mermaidcore, thanks to the new Barbie movie and the Little Mermaid remake.

Often, cultural artifacts from the past are retroactively labeled “[insert name]core” if they feature visual elements that happen to align with a particular -core: 1993’s The Secret Garden, for example, is referred to as a “cottagecore movie;” 1700s French ruler Marie Antoinette screams “princesscore.” 

There are multiple signs of -core exhaustion, given that most -cores today just indicate a trend, and trends are famously ephemeral. #corecore is a meta and ironic commentary of the oversaturation of -cores. Still, these terms and trends are arguably useful. “These micro-trends are a way for writers and commentators to make new collections and designers’ ideas more digestible or understandable for a broader audience,” José Criales-Unzueta wrote for i-D in December 2022.

Meeting in the Middle

Cores have started morphing into -sleazes, which subvert their source material from within, “making it grungier and edgier, rather than attempting to capture the purest essence of an aesthetic, the way ‘-cores’ do,” VICE reports. 

Where balletcore is all about the dreamy stagecraft of The Nutcracker and the pristine, blush-pink leotards and tutus, ballerina sleaze depicts gritty, worn-out costumes. Where mermaidcore is an underwater fantasy, the mermaidsleaze look is more shipwreck survivor. They are like a lite version of the various -punks—now all they need are themed conventions, fashion lines, and movies.  

In all, what ties all aesthetics and subcultures together is a focus on visuals that depart from the mainstream. Ultimately, at the root of them all lies our own relationship to technology: there’s little wonder that, while technically dating back the 1980s, -cores, -punks, and -waves all started firmly taking hold in the age of smartphones. 

Overall, it reminds me of the theory of creator Curious XP, who was referring, specifically, to steampunk, but whose sentiment could be applied to the trend as a whole: “Modern design strives to be 99% invisible,” he said, pointing out that it is now hardly possible to pick your own smartphone from a row of identical devices.“[Subcultures and aesthetics] are in love with details, ornaments, and moving parts.”