The domino effect of Early 2010's Tumblr aesthetics to Yung Lean's Ginseng Strip 2002 to Travis Scott's beginnings to 10 people dying at an Astroworld concert is kinda wild.
@@snifflesnacksnco3789Vaporwave inspires the general aesthetic of Yung Lean's first big single Ginseng Strip 2002, Lean continues to gather attention, fellow upcoming rapper Travis Scott likes his music and features on his 2014 debut commercial album Unknown Memory, Travis Scott has his big break one year later with his 2015 album Rodeo, he continues on to be one of the biggest trap artists ever, releases his 2018 album Astroworld and cements his place as a gigantic hitmaker, introduces his festival of the same name that same year, it runs for two years until the pandemic hits, it returns in 2021 and the infamous crowd crush tragedy happens at this iteration of the festival
I used to do a lot of photography of abandoned houses and upload them to tumblr just in a “wow look at this cool building I saw while walking around in the forest!” And had no idea that morute was a thing and I would get excited seeing someone would reblog my photos only to see their blog was full of crime scene photos and dead animals 😭
im happy to see someone talking about these aesthetics. i always hoped they could be discussed somewhere, i grew up with these during the early to late 2010s as i had unrestricted internet access and wanted to be a part of these many aesthetics on tumblr when i was a tween back in the day. it still feels like yesterday
im glad to see nicole dollanganger mentioned, too!! i once discovered her in 2014 and it has changed me ever since. i always considered her music as healing
i was a tumblr user™️ in 2017 and i made the soft grunge aesthetic my entire personality. my blog never took off but 2025 i am fully embracing the 2014 tumblr soft grunge style back into my wardrobe. i don’t care if its trending again or not. i may be cringe but i am free
I'm 30 and I'm also ready to embrace early 2010s trends and actually mix it up with goth elements. Now I can do what I want without strictly following one specific look
i miss old tumblr days. its was a visual treat for my eyes every single day and I ran a tumblr dedicated to my past love of the genre of digital hardcore music, which often got a lot of interesting traction. happy new years Randy, keep up the great content.
Finally someone is talking about the 2010s pastel goth!! I remember making my tumblr during my freshman year in high school, and discovering pastel goth and soft grunge immediately loving it. I was already into alternative fashion but my family wouldn't let me wear all black so that aesthetic was the perfect in between. it really helped me express myself as I was talking fashion designer classes at the time. I still have items from that time and wear it alot.
This video made me realize that I have no idea what young people are into now, because I think of stuff like vaporwave as basically current and here people are saying that it peaked over ten years ago. I’m in my thirties and I think mentally I’m still in 2019, not really realizing that 2019 is six years ago.
Ugh I love vaporwave ever since I stumbled by mistake on it when I was 13. Vaporwave and other styles associated to it TOTALLY inspired things like the frutiger aero renaissance and weirdcore
thank you SO much for mentioning nicole in the "morute" section! I was very much into that scene years ago and even got the opprotunity to see her live! I feel like the tiktok people never give her the flowers she deserves because shes the blueprint for sure. Also yeah, nobody started using morute until recently LOL. I did sometmes hear "sad baby doll" thrown around though. (usually on lolcow) I still have some of the vintage nightgowns i used to wear as outers lol. how times change. ALSO I MISS JESS WOODS SO MUCH?? Im so sad that she left, she really was so talented.
i'd be so interested in a polyvore retrospective if thats something people remember... alot of these trends had huge overlap with polyvore, especially the "anon" culture on there plus the shock of polyvore being shut down was a very strange and interesting internet moment for me personally
So happy about the seapunk mentions! I was a bit of a anchor in that scene. I did a LOT of edits, since before that I was also making those glitter "drink bleach" gifs, so I had enough experience. I had a blog called SeapunkSquad that indexed a crap load of Etsy, bigcartel, polyvore, and "personal shoppers". I used to get sent a good amount of stuff to dress up and edit for promos haha. Brands like Mainframe and Timefly were so cool since it was at the advent of all over print material (shops like Print All Over Me came about that time too). The coveted buffalo platforms were a big staple too. One big critique that people had against seapunk that is often forgotten was the weird interest in burkas/niqab/muslim coverings in general, and Arabic. Never really got that one. People like Nikki Lipstick and yard666sale really capitalized on those. I could yap forever about the seapunk era though, thanks for bringing back memories!
I love the morute aesthetic (i didn't know it was the name of it) but I just call it "creepy cute" and it's my favorite I wish I had more clothes that fit it!
I feel like irl Vaporwave can best be summed up by the 1991 Miami Dolphins and episodes of American Gladiators. I doubt anyone but me would get that, but being 41 and a kid at the time living through it, that is the vibe I get.
hearing you list off soft grunge and hearing 90% of it match my current style and/or my style in the last couple years felt like a call out post thank you for the early morning call out
Thank you for mentioning Corp in the Vaporwave section, he’s one of the main reasons I’m into Vaporwave. I will say I’m surprised you didn’t mention Luxury Elite or even TUPPERWAVE but regardless very well done section!
it's so jarring having been in the thick of it and hearing people talk about my core memories as a retrospective. growing older is such a strange feeling. it's like i started listening to arctic monkeys and stealing aesthetics from tumblr for my google plus page yesterday.
I was most active on Tumblr around 2010-2012 while Vaporwave and Witch House were a thing. I was already into my 20s at that point so I didn't stick around for long. I still have my account (with my windows 98 theme lol) but I rarely go on there anymore.
The Morute section was such a throw back omg. I used to listen to Nicole Dollanganger ALL THE TIME in 2014-2017. This whole video was such a fun look back at trends I remember, and was such a fun insight into where aesthetics I still like and meld into my personal style came from.
I was a soft grunge teen and I didn’t know until now and I’m embarrassed. It’s still shows in my shoe and sweater choice and that makes it so much more embarrassing
Mustaches and peace signs were a already popular in the year of 2010. Maybe even late 2009. I remember, I was there, a really annoyed junior in high school. I couldn’t get past it lol
You put names to a bunch of aesthetics I had no idea were actually categorized, very interesting. You got me wondering. How would you categorize your current aesthetic? Love the glasses/hair combo!
Omg the soft grunge era part felt like nostalgia ripping thru my body every which way. It was so ingrained into my life and my personality and all of my friends and boyfriends. What a time to be alive lol
hi i just redownloaded tumblr, i found posts form 8 years ago that made me smile. grunge outfits, holographic shoes, and plants all over bedrooms. i miss the internet before ai and massive influencers!! awesome video
Gosh, I don't want to sound like someone who constantly gets stuck in the past, even the recent past, but I quite cherish those early days of vaporwave and vapor related genres and style trends. Tumblr was a fun experience just to shift through. I was shedding off my 4chan skin and venturing out into other spaces because I was growing out of it. For some of the drama that occurred then, I just didn't see it. I knew how to filter my experience pretty well and it was easier to do so back then.
I got into the Vaporwave scene rather late, like 2016/2017, well past its peak when everyone was either sharing Aesthetic™️ images and videos, or dismissing it entirely by parroting the meme phrase "Vaporwave is dead". I graduated from chopped-and-screwed 90s samples to frutiguer aero around 2021. INTERNET CLUB was a huge inspiration to me, plus my personal attachment to an aesthetic I like to call "Mid-2000s Greenhouse Galleria Bookstore"; cozy dark carpeted spiral landings with greenhouse skylights, and curvy/circular interior designs with a dash of hope for a green future, not unlike Solarpunk. Also, that audio clip of the high-pitched girl reading off "The Swag Asian" will always live in my head rent-free.
ahhh ive been waiting for this moment, i always thought as a kid going through these phases that someday someone would make a video about all these aesthetics, ty sm for making this!!❤️❤️😺
I felt called out but I also remember how much fun i had in the soft grunge aesthetic back in late middle school and highschool. Also the swag Asian was like a sub culture of pre-2020’s “ABG”, like Ryan Higa and all, truly a period piece of Asian America.
this is such good information, and well explained!!! but i really wish there were more images and visual examples for such a visual topic, it would elevate it even more😊
your channel has very quickly become one of my top 3 favourites, and I'm stoked to see your subscriber count has gone up heaps since I subbed- you deserve it my dude!!! I just have a good ass time on your channel
like it makes me feel old that my teenage years are now old enough for a retrospective but I'm loving it, tumblr was the best of times it was the blurst of times
Also it's crazy how i never realized that most of my (and my friend's) middle school outfits were mostly soft grunge lol. Good, nostalgic times. And the 2014 girly walked so the clean girl aesthetic could run
I used to run a goth tumblr blog that centered specifically around plus size goths. I remember wanting to be a pastel goth so badly but didn’t think I could because of my size (most of the pastel goth brands didn’t carry my size) and a few years after I abandoned my blog, a friend messaged me with a screenshot of one of my tumblr selfies that made into a TikTok video that was explaining different types of goths, and they’d categorized me as pastel goth. A few more years later and I think I’m disappointed at the way pastel goth fizzled out, I don’t think it ever really reached its full potential. I think it might be partially due to the rise of fast fashion around that time and it being an aesthetic based subculture that didn’t encourage diy as much as other other subcultures like goth and punk did. The pastel parts of it definitely lived on though. Watching this video I also realized I was more soft grunge than I thought at the time too!
I was DEEP in both the vaporwave AND soft grunge aesthetic mines back in the day. Although my actual tumblr (which I painstakingly coded myself) was mainly vaporwave colors and imagery, I found soft grunge was a much easier aesthetic to replicate in real life as a teenager mostly going to thrift stores and forever21. I would also BEG for american apparel clothes for christmas and my birthday, and I still have my light wash mom jeans and my black grid-pattern a-line skirt to this day! I also used to dye my hair crazy colors a few times a year (which my mom insisted we do at the salon lmao). I even decorated my dorm in my freshman year of college to be the typical "soft grunge" styling with the grid bedspread and a bunch of prints from my instagram taped to the wall. It's very funny seeing the photo of the kids standing against the wall continue to go viral even today (mostly as a meme), because that photo was my life for so long 😂its especially wild seeing kids too young to have experienced that time posting about it now almost wistfully. I think a variation of soft grunge will make a return alongside the revival of indie sleaze, which actually seems to be a sort of origin point for multiple popular tumblr aesthetics, especially the ones that broke containment and entered the mainstream.
Omg!!! The Impact of "the types of Tumblr girls" (34:30) !! Def one of my fav styles at the time & the artist recently revealed herself and she said she stopped her art to go into the abg (asian baby girl)/bottle girl lifestyle hence the swag asian part. Lmao she's pretty iconic for that
You forgot to mention the scene kid aesthetic. Although it was on its way out, it was still around in the early 2010's, but had taken on more of a cybergoth influence with black baggy jeans with neon designs on them (I had a pair myself with a turquoise biohazard symbol on one of the back pockets). Also, a load of random straps on everything (again, cybergoth influence). I feel like the artwork for APB: Reloaded is a good representation of what scene fashion looked like at the time. We also listened to a lot of dubstep. This style was very short lived though as I feel like it completely vanished after 2012, right around when dubstep died out too.
You forgot to include Lake Radio in the witch house genre! He has a massive discography on bandcamp. Tons of people used his music without credit & he was somewhat of a recluse so never got the recognition he deserved, but his music was incredibly good.
I've been using Tumblr since I was 15 (I'm about to be 23 this month) and I was there during all the eras, like soft grunge and vaporwave. I remember wearing tattoo chokers, space buns, dark lipstick, and 80s graphic tees in high school lol! It's so sad that Tumblr users are like, "non-existent" now. I really hope Tumblr doesn't go defunct, since blogging is my literal life and that's where I upload lost or really niche media.
I was too young to use tumblr when a lot of these aesthetics were at their peak (i was 5 in 2012 💀) but I absolutely love looking through old archives of them !! I finally made a blog a few years ago, and getting to reblog all these things 12+ years later is so healing to my younger self who was so jealous her sister / older cousins who got to live through that time 🙏 I love videos like this thank u for an actual deep dive, a lot of people skip out on the the more lost aesthetics now (especially like witch house and sea punk… nobody gaf anymore 😞) !! deff gonna look into some of the specific influencers you mentioned !!! 10/10
Soft grunge was the more attainable option for teens to identify themselves as opposed to the morute or the witchcore styles we observed as younger before we starting building our own identies
I was sooo obssesed with the soft grunge aesthetic back in high school, but because I was a broke jobless teen who couldnt afford the clothing style, now as a 24 y/o mi whole wardrobe is transforming into my teenage 2017 dream
Oh my goddd the flashbacks I got from the soft grunge, quality, and girly pics with all the Arctic monkeys and black and white grid patterns and Starbucks holy shit, I got sent directly back to high school 2014 😭
Us Midwest kids really were obsessed with punk and hardcore stuff. This was during my golden years, when I just graduated high school in 2011, been on Tumblr for years by then and going to all the local shows I could (and ignoring my college work lol) I can say for sure us art alt kids were dabbling in all of these and trying our best not to be called hipsters or punk. I love that we valued creativity so much, and we were trying our best to be inclusive. It was all done sloppily and clunkily but we meant (usually) well. I just wish there was still scenes like this locally ):
My only critique is on the "death" of witch house, it's actually exceptionally alive and probably one of the most active micro genres I know of. Crystal Castles wasn't witch house, they were future punk with witch house influence. Witch house just has a fixation on remaining underground, but it is absolutely thriving and active, moreso than it was back when King Plague, Salem, Crim3s, and oOoOO brought the genre into public eye. Good video :)
30:39 this made me realize just how monumentally impactful the tumblr soft grunge aesthetic has been to both my tweenhood and teenhood (or actually, my entire life, because i am only 19).
my 27 year old heart is so full!! i still regularly use tumblr mostly to scream into the void bc i made my current blog in 2019 and have like 30 followers and they never interact with me lol but i've been on there since 2011
This was so interesting. I didn't know about a lot of these! I pretty much only knew hipster and one that wasn't in this video the poppunk/emo 2010s haha
The domino effect of Early 2010's Tumblr aesthetics to Yung Lean's Ginseng Strip 2002 to Travis Scott's beginnings to 10 people dying at an Astroworld concert is kinda wild.
you could probably connect it back to 9/11 with all the MCR stuff around Tumblr
please i desperately need you to elaborate on this. you can't just say that with no explanation 😭🙏
@@snifflesnacksnco3789 Travis said Lean was a big inspiration therefore no Lean means Travis wouldn't have blown up and those 10 would be alive
9/11 killed 10 people at a Travis Scott concert
@@snifflesnacksnco3789Vaporwave inspires the general aesthetic of Yung Lean's first big single Ginseng Strip 2002, Lean continues to gather attention, fellow upcoming rapper Travis Scott likes his music and features on his 2014 debut commercial album Unknown Memory, Travis Scott has his big break one year later with his 2015 album Rodeo, he continues on to be one of the biggest trap artists ever, releases his 2018 album Astroworld and cements his place as a gigantic hitmaker, introduces his festival of the same name that same year, it runs for two years until the pandemic hits, it returns in 2021 and the infamous crowd crush tragedy happens at this iteration of the festival
The impact soft grunge had in the midwest was insane, that aesthetic was very popular in my 2012-2016 high school years
Almost every girl in Highschool was on that wave.
Not a midwest or even an american thing, it was huge here in western europe too
I used to do a lot of photography of abandoned houses and upload them to tumblr just in a “wow look at this cool building I saw while walking around in the forest!” And had no idea that morute was a thing and I would get excited seeing someone would reblog my photos only to see their blog was full of crime scene photos and dead animals 😭
lol
im happy to see someone talking about these aesthetics. i always hoped they could be discussed somewhere, i grew up with these during the early to late 2010s as i had unrestricted internet access and wanted to be a part of these many aesthetics on tumblr when i was a tween back in the day. it still feels like yesterday
im glad to see nicole dollanganger mentioned, too!! i once discovered her in 2014 and it has changed me ever since. i always considered her music as healing
i was a tumblr user™️ in 2017 and i made the soft grunge aesthetic my entire personality. my blog never took off but 2025 i am fully embracing the 2014 tumblr soft grunge style back into my wardrobe. i don’t care if its trending again or not. i may be cringe but i am free
who cares if it’s trending, go for it! trends last like a month anyways lol it’ll prolly be back soon enough
Me too! To this day I have my oversized jean jacket, big blue rounded glasses and Polaroids my friends and I took during that time
I'm 30 and I'm also ready to embrace early 2010s trends and actually mix it up with goth elements. Now I can do what I want without strictly following one specific look
i miss old tumblr days. its was a visual treat for my eyes every single day and I ran a tumblr dedicated to my past love of the genre of digital hardcore music, which often got a lot of interesting traction.
happy new years Randy, keep up the great content.
Finally someone is talking about the 2010s pastel goth!! I remember making my tumblr during my freshman year in high school, and discovering pastel goth and soft grunge immediately loving it. I was already into alternative fashion but my family wouldn't let me wear all black so that aesthetic was the perfect in between. it really helped me express myself as I was talking fashion designer classes at the time. I still have items from that time and wear it alot.
Awesome job! I would love a equally detailed breakdown of the history of "Tumblr Sexymen"
We really loved a pencil thin man with sleeve tattoos, a septum ring, and a cigarette 😮💨
This video made me realize that I have no idea what young people are into now, because I think of stuff like vaporwave as basically current and here people are saying that it peaked over ten years ago. I’m in my thirties and I think mentally I’m still in 2019, not really realizing that 2019 is six years ago.
2019 is still last year to me
Yeah my phone theme is still vaporware with pink/blue filtered windows 98 icons. I still love it.
Ugh I love vaporwave ever since I stumbled by mistake on it when I was 13. Vaporwave and other styles associated to it TOTALLY inspired things like the frutiger aero renaissance and weirdcore
thank you SO much for mentioning nicole in the "morute" section! I was very much into that scene years ago and even got the opprotunity to see her live! I feel like the tiktok people never give her the flowers she deserves because shes the blueprint for sure. Also yeah, nobody started using morute until recently LOL. I did sometmes hear "sad baby doll" thrown around though. (usually on lolcow) I still have some of the vintage nightgowns i used to wear as outers lol. how times change. ALSO I MISS JESS WOODS SO MUCH?? Im so sad that she left, she really was so talented.
as a 00s hipster who became out of touch in the 2010s I appreciate this informational documentary
i'd be so interested in a polyvore retrospective if thats something people remember... alot of these trends had huge overlap with polyvore, especially the "anon" culture on there plus the shock of polyvore being shut down was a very strange and interesting internet moment for me personally
Oh how I miss polyvore so much!
omg i loved polyvore i used it to make outfits for my terrible fanfics LOL
So happy about the seapunk mentions! I was a bit of a anchor in that scene. I did a LOT of edits, since before that I was also making those glitter "drink bleach" gifs, so I had enough experience. I had a blog called SeapunkSquad that indexed a crap load of Etsy, bigcartel, polyvore, and "personal shoppers". I used to get sent a good amount of stuff to dress up and edit for promos haha. Brands like Mainframe and Timefly were so cool since it was at the advent of all over print material (shops like Print All Over Me came about that time too). The coveted buffalo platforms were a big staple too. One big critique that people had against seapunk that is often forgotten was the weird interest in burkas/niqab/muslim coverings in general, and Arabic. Never really got that one. People like Nikki Lipstick and yard666sale really capitalized on those.
I could yap forever about the seapunk era though, thanks for bringing back memories!
Omg I remember your stuff!! Need to bring this back tbh
Asside from the aforementioned weird borderline cultural appropriation ofc lol
Anchor hehe
OMG polyvore i completely forgot about that app i used to love it so much
OH i remember you!!!
I love the morute aesthetic (i didn't know it was the name of it) but I just call it "creepy cute" and it's my favorite I wish I had more clothes that fit it!
I feel like irl Vaporwave can best be summed up by the 1991 Miami Dolphins and episodes of American Gladiators. I doubt anyone but me would get that, but being 41 and a kid at the time living through it, that is the vibe I get.
91 dolphins => ace ventura
hearing you list off soft grunge and hearing 90% of it match my current style and/or my style in the last couple years felt like a call out post thank you for the early morning call out
Thank you for mentioning Corp in the Vaporwave section, he’s one of the main reasons I’m into Vaporwave. I will say I’m surprised you didn’t mention Luxury Elite or even TUPPERWAVE but regardless very well done section!
i can’t wait for a few years when people make these about “2020s tiktok aesthetics”
it's so jarring having been in the thick of it and hearing people talk about my core memories as a retrospective. growing older is such a strange feeling. it's like i started listening to arctic monkeys and stealing aesthetics from tumblr for my google plus page yesterday.
okay so this is literally just a deep dive on my 2011-2015 blog LMAO. sea punk, pastel goth/grunge, soft grunge, and morute. this brings me baaaack
When you're reviewing old Tumblr blogs, trigger warnings are basically a given.
Season's Greasons, friends! 🎉🖤✨️
so happy this channel blew up
I was most active on Tumblr around 2010-2012 while Vaporwave and Witch House were a thing. I was already into my 20s at that point so I didn't stick around for long. I still have my account (with my windows 98 theme lol) but I rarely go on there anymore.
The Morute section was such a throw back omg. I used to listen to Nicole Dollanganger ALL THE TIME in 2014-2017. This whole video was such a fun look back at trends I remember, and was such a fun insight into where aesthetics I still like and meld into my personal style came from.
Adore the vaporwave stuff, I had no idea it had a specific category to it
It’s so wild watching this while still being obsessed with vaporwave
Right? Bandcamp artists are releasing vaporwave stuff on the reg.
I was a soft grunge teen and I didn’t know until now and I’m embarrassed. It’s still shows in my shoe and sweater choice and that makes it so much more embarrassing
Soft grunge, bad influences the aesthetic had on teens aside, totally rocked lol
No need to be embarrassed!
@ dw I’m only embarrassed that I didn’t realise until 2 0 2 5 we were cool as hell
Gen z kids love that shit lol don’t be embarrassed
Mustaches and peace signs were a already popular in the year of 2010. Maybe even late 2009. I remember, I was there, a really annoyed junior in high school. I couldn’t get past it lol
You put names to a bunch of aesthetics I had no idea were actually categorized, very interesting. You got me wondering. How would you categorize your current aesthetic? Love the glasses/hair combo!
even tho i was 12 i loved the soft grunge sky ferreira and quality aesthetic i basically mixed them together, loved brandy and american apparel
Omg the soft grunge era part felt like nostalgia ripping thru my body every which way. It was so ingrained into my life and my personality and all of my friends and boyfriends. What a time to be alive lol
i wish i didnt delete my blog cause of the ban it was a mix of soft grunge, soft ghetto and morute i miss it 😢
every time you post an angel is born
watching this hungover so i might have got this wrong but i NEED to hear more on whatever happened to sidewalks and skeletons...
hi i just redownloaded tumblr, i found posts form 8 years ago that made me smile. grunge outfits, holographic shoes, and plants all over bedrooms. i miss the internet before ai and massive influencers!! awesome video
This videos was an immediate dose of nostalgia, and so insightful! I love your narrative style! ❤
Gosh, I don't want to sound like someone who constantly gets stuck in the past, even the recent past, but I quite cherish those early days of vaporwave and vapor related genres and style trends. Tumblr was a fun experience just to shift through. I was shedding off my 4chan skin and venturing out into other spaces because I was growing out of it. For some of the drama that occurred then, I just didn't see it. I knew how to filter my experience pretty well and it was easier to do so back then.
Shoutout the original thumbnail. Your outfits were bomb 🤘
FINALLY YOU HAVE FED US I've been needing long ass videos from you to sleep well
23:34 ahhhh i was thinking of jazmin when you brought up this aesthetic!! i love their music and style!
I got into the Vaporwave scene rather late, like 2016/2017, well past its peak when everyone was either sharing Aesthetic™️ images and videos, or dismissing it entirely by parroting the meme phrase "Vaporwave is dead". I graduated from chopped-and-screwed 90s samples to frutiguer aero around 2021. INTERNET CLUB was a huge inspiration to me, plus my personal attachment to an aesthetic I like to call "Mid-2000s Greenhouse Galleria Bookstore"; cozy dark carpeted spiral landings with greenhouse skylights, and curvy/circular interior designs with a dash of hope for a green future, not unlike Solarpunk.
Also, that audio clip of the high-pitched girl reading off "The Swag Asian" will always live in my head rent-free.
Your content helps me get through the day. Every time you drop I get so excited - love you Randy!!!
i just realized 80's pink and teal were originally just faded red and blue, like a pepsi poster in a sunny window
ahhh ive been waiting for this moment, i always thought as a kid going through these phases that someday someone would make a video about all these aesthetics, ty sm for making this!!❤️❤️😺
vaporwave still rules
this played in the background while i was puking out my hangover. thank u for keeping me company
I love learning about the internet I would have been involved in if I had only not been homeschooled and allowed on the internet as a teen
we all love randy moon
Bruh this is how my sister was back then. I didn't know it was Tumblr.
Never heard the term soft grunge till now happy new year’s
Great video. Feels like I'm being talked to in a foreign language while being expected to understand.
I felt called out but I also remember how much fun i had in the soft grunge aesthetic back in late middle school and highschool.
Also the swag Asian was like a sub culture of pre-2020’s “ABG”, like Ryan Higa and all, truly a period piece of Asian America.
being in middle school during these tumblr eras really shaped my clothing taste & music choice. arctic monkeys is still my go-to till this day
this is such good information, and well explained!!! but i really wish there were more images and visual examples for such a visual topic, it would elevate it even more😊
your channel has very quickly become one of my top 3 favourites, and I'm stoked to see your subscriber count has gone up heaps since I subbed- you deserve it my dude!!! I just have a good ass time on your channel
like it makes me feel old that my teenage years are now old enough for a retrospective but I'm loving it, tumblr was the best of times it was the blurst of times
i was never pastel goth but i still think it's SUCH a pretty and fun way of dressing.
I refuse to believe some of this stuff, so vital to my early teen years, was over 10 years ago. Jesus. Great video!
Also it's crazy how i never realized that most of my (and my friend's) middle school outfits were mostly soft grunge lol. Good, nostalgic times.
And the 2014 girly walked so the clean girl aesthetic could run
This was great!! Very nostalgic!!
I used to run a goth tumblr blog that centered specifically around plus size goths. I remember wanting to be a pastel goth so badly but didn’t think I could because of my size (most of the pastel goth brands didn’t carry my size) and a few years after I abandoned my blog, a friend messaged me with a screenshot of one of my tumblr selfies that made into a TikTok video that was explaining different types of goths, and they’d categorized me as pastel goth.
A few more years later and I think I’m disappointed at the way pastel goth fizzled out, I don’t think it ever really reached its full potential. I think it might be partially due to the rise of fast fashion around that time and it being an aesthetic based subculture that didn’t encourage diy as much as other other subcultures like goth and punk did. The pastel parts of it definitely lived on though.
Watching this video I also realized I was more soft grunge than I thought at the time too!
GODDDD i was sooo into the vaporwave aesthetic when I was a teenager :D I still fondly remember the aesthetics and music
7:12 SIPPIN ON PROMETHAZINE 🔥🔥🔥🗣🗣🗣🗣🗣
15:15 dropping that w zero explanation is crazy 😭💀
ok, the music from sims 2 is the most unexpected thing in this video
Hatsune Mike gangnam styling on my Grandma's grave is beautiful ngl 😍😍😍😍❤️❤️❤️❤️
hey some of us still like john green novels and hunger games, randall.
John Green cost us post editing.
I was DEEP in both the vaporwave AND soft grunge aesthetic mines back in the day. Although my actual tumblr (which I painstakingly coded myself) was mainly vaporwave colors and imagery, I found soft grunge was a much easier aesthetic to replicate in real life as a teenager mostly going to thrift stores and forever21. I would also BEG for american apparel clothes for christmas and my birthday, and I still have my light wash mom jeans and my black grid-pattern a-line skirt to this day! I also used to dye my hair crazy colors a few times a year (which my mom insisted we do at the salon lmao). I even decorated my dorm in my freshman year of college to be the typical "soft grunge" styling with the grid bedspread and a bunch of prints from my instagram taped to the wall. It's very funny seeing the photo of the kids standing against the wall continue to go viral even today (mostly as a meme), because that photo was my life for so long 😂its especially wild seeing kids too young to have experienced that time posting about it now almost wistfully. I think a variation of soft grunge will make a return alongside the revival of indie sleaze, which actually seems to be a sort of origin point for multiple popular tumblr aesthetics, especially the ones that broke containment and entered the mainstream.
S O F T G R U N G E W I L L L I V E F O R E V E R..!!
i didn’t have tumblr but i was obsessed with soft grunge on pinterest when i was like ten
Crazy how much of this I can remember experiencing while not even really being on tumblr lol
Omg!!! The Impact of "the types of Tumblr girls" (34:30) !! Def one of my fav styles at the time & the artist recently revealed herself and she said she stopped her art to go into the abg (asian baby girl)/bottle girl lifestyle hence the swag asian part. Lmao she's pretty iconic for that
Sea punk and Vaporwave will live in my heart forever
fantastic video !
You forgot to mention the scene kid aesthetic. Although it was on its way out, it was still around in the early 2010's, but had taken on more of a cybergoth influence with black baggy jeans with neon designs on them (I had a pair myself with a turquoise biohazard symbol on one of the back pockets). Also, a load of random straps on everything (again, cybergoth influence). I feel like the artwork for APB: Reloaded is a good representation of what scene fashion looked like at the time. We also listened to a lot of dubstep. This style was very short lived though as I feel like it completely vanished after 2012, right around when dubstep died out too.
You forgot to include Lake Radio in the witch house genre! He has a massive discography on bandcamp. Tons of people used his music without credit & he was somewhat of a recluse so never got the recognition he deserved, but his music was incredibly good.
I've been using Tumblr since I was 15 (I'm about to be 23 this month) and I was there during all the eras, like soft grunge and vaporwave. I remember wearing tattoo chokers, space buns, dark lipstick, and 80s graphic tees in high school lol! It's so sad that Tumblr users are like, "non-existent" now. I really hope Tumblr doesn't go defunct, since blogging is my literal life and that's where I upload lost or really niche media.
Randymaxxing rn
Happy new years
Ngl i feel like i'm paying for my vaporwave crimes now with all the y2k/frutiger aero stuff going around
talking about vapor wave without talking about yung lean or cities aviv 💔
I was too young to use tumblr when a lot of these aesthetics were at their peak (i was 5 in 2012 💀) but I absolutely love looking through old archives of them !! I finally made a blog a few years ago, and getting to reblog all these things 12+ years later is so healing to my younger self who was so jealous her sister / older cousins who got to live through that time 🙏 I love videos like this thank u for an actual deep dive, a lot of people skip out on the the more lost aesthetics now (especially like witch house and sea punk… nobody gaf anymore 😞) !! deff gonna look into some of the specific influencers you mentioned !!! 10/10
Soft grunge was the more attainable option for teens to identify themselves as opposed to the morute or the witchcore styles we observed as younger before we starting building our own identies
goated video and shirt ngl
I was sooo obssesed with the soft grunge aesthetic back in high school, but because I was a broke jobless teen who couldnt afford the clothing style, now as a 24 y/o mi whole wardrobe is transforming into my teenage 2017 dream
Oh my goddd the flashbacks I got from the soft grunge, quality, and girly pics with all the Arctic monkeys and black and white grid patterns and Starbucks holy shit, I got sent directly back to high school 2014 😭
Us Midwest kids really were obsessed with punk and hardcore stuff. This was during my golden years, when I just graduated high school in 2011, been on Tumblr for years by then and going to all the local shows I could (and ignoring my college work lol) I can say for sure us art alt kids were dabbling in all of these and trying our best not to be called hipsters or punk. I love that we valued creativity so much, and we were trying our best to be inclusive. It was all done sloppily and clunkily but we meant (usually) well. I just wish there was still scenes like this locally ):
Thank you randy moon!
i miss this era of tumblr so much
34:30 that one is SCORCHED into my brain from like 2016-2018
My only critique is on the "death" of witch house, it's actually exceptionally alive and probably one of the most active micro genres I know of. Crystal Castles wasn't witch house, they were future punk with witch house influence. Witch house just has a fixation on remaining underground, but it is absolutely thriving and active, moreso than it was back when King Plague, Salem, Crim3s, and oOoOO brought the genre into public eye. Good video :)
Pastel Goths gave a huge influence of the new goths/alternative style of this era
I was obsessed with yami kawaii as a teen I once filled a syringe with pink glitter to make it a keychain.
30:39 this made me realize just how monumentally impactful the tumblr soft grunge aesthetic has been to both my tweenhood and teenhood (or actually, my entire life, because i am only 19).
my 27 year old heart is so full!! i still regularly use tumblr mostly to scream into the void bc i made my current blog in 2019 and have like 30 followers and they never interact with me lol but i've been on there since 2011
why is your videos soo good
This was so interesting. I didn't know about a lot of these! I pretty much only knew hipster and one that wasn't in this video the poppunk/emo 2010s haha
15:11 LETS GOOOOO IC3PEAK MENTIONED‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️
Starting with vaporwave?
You know what you’re talking about, that’s what first brought me to tumblr 😅
We need to bring the Swag Asian back
I'm begging y'all to bring back creepers😩 I didn't have them at that time and now I want them but can't find them anywhere😭