- Words
- Paul Moore
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- Date
- 12 November 2025
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The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute proves that subcultures are thriving more than ever
Ever been obsessed with a certain look, but you can’t describe it? From Frutiger Aero to Utopian Scholastic, Cari gives your favourite bygone aesthetics a name and a home – and is quietly changing the digital archive game.
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From coquette to dark academia, girl-dinner to white boy summer, micro-trends dominate the internet. Interests, fashion and fandoms have become so granular, with everyone out to try to create their own aesthetic, that the average person is often left feeling dizzy from the esoteric jargon of the online design world. We live in a wonderfully varied, but confusing, fragmented polyculture, sometimes so difficult to navigate that people wonder if subcultures no longer exist. But the worlds of obscure aesthetics within the larger design universe offer a drastically different perspective. Subcultures are in fact thriving – they’re alive, they’re actively shaping our world and anything, no matter how niche, can belong to somebody.
Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute
Through websites such as the volunteer-led, non-profit Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, everybody’s favourite aesthetic has its own fanclub and its own label – an act of categorisation that is becoming increasingly important to forward thinking individuals. Everything on Cari is something you’ve seen before: in restaurants, shopping malls, posters, technology, clothes, brand identities, you name it. Founded by Evan Collins, Sofi Xian and Froyo Tam – a mix of architects, designers and self-taught archivists – Cari calls these visual movements “consumer aesthetics” – a lexicon for design trends and ephemera created under capital; aesthetics that are shaped by what we buy, where we buy, why we buy.
What’s the difference?
So, what is a consumer aesthetic and how is it different from the types of micro-trends we see in countless thinkpieces and on our social media feeds today? “A consumer aesthetic is a set of multimodal signs which have gained enough staying power to enter corporate advertising and disperse globally through consumer culture where they compete with other consumer aesthetics,” says co-founder Sofi. Cari’s website also sums up consumer aesthetics as: “A visual movement unified by overarching attitudes and themes that survived long enough or became popular enough to be appropriated by capital.”
As for micro-trends, Evan describes them as intentional attempts by agencies and corporations to drive engagement towards curated products and services. However, always an optimist, Evan argues that some of these are well intentioned and worthwhile: “In the case of girl-dinner and cottagecore, those do seem to at least initially come from a genuine source, a joking TikTok or Tumblr subculture respectively; as opposed to being internally formulated by a corporation and then disseminated in a more top-down approach.”
Being held together by a strong zeitgeist or an overarching ideology serves as the foundation for a longstanding aesthetic, which shows why popular aesthetics such as Indie Sleaze (characterised by high-flash photography, electro-rock dance halls and old American Apparel ads) or Weirdcore (influenced by the general look of images shared on the internet from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s) have seen a comeback in the past few years. As consumers, we all find what feeds us personally. The reason why so many aesthetics exist is baked into our social DNA; the urge to seek out our interests, hold onto them and create communities of like-minded appreciators.
Image for NEC, by Steve Bronstein of RGA / PRINT scanned from New Media Showcase 3 (1993)
Blendo Atom - Cover for a 1991 issue of Verbum Magazine by Jack Davis scanned from Collage with Photoshop (1998)
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Amazon Rainforest commercial art illustration by Kevin Simnacher scanned from Airbrush Action 4 (1995)
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Amazon Rainforest commercial art illustration by Kevin Simnacher scanned from Airbrush Action 4 (1995)
“The reason why so many aesthetics exist is baked into our social DNA; the urge to seek out our interests, hold onto them and create communities of like-minded appreciators.”
Paul Moore
The origins of Cari
Cari’s founders have been active for over ten years – documenting design trends in corporate and consumer worlds, decoding cultural attitudes through our visual preferences and even coining aesthetics we’re becoming increasingly familiar with now. Co-founder Evan Collins began collecting archival imagery of niche aesthetics that interested him over a summer holiday, whilst Froyo Tam’s interests in visual identities originated in an obsession with television station logos and idents. Sofi Xian began her research in something she calls Weird Facebook, where even the well-known Indie Sleaze originated (coined as “indie über-sleaze” by Dalia Barillaro).
“There were groups such as ‘Office Aesthetics’, ‘Medical Aesthetics’, or ‘Unpopular Memes’ that tried to identify overarching qualities that were common to particular metacontexts, such as corporate and clinical themes, cultural backgrounds and ‘bad’ memes,” says Sofi. Needless to say, there’s always been corners of the internet that have championed overlooked art and design.
Although worshipping, following and digitally archiving hyper-specific visual identities as a teenager may seem like a strange hobby to some, this is only the beginning for design enthusiasts. In fact, it’s very normal – and the art sphere is so much better for it.
In the 2010s, Vaporwave began to take hold of the internet’s attention, introducing people to alternative aesthetics through collective nostalgia, parodies of consumerism, commodification of the past and synth-heavy music of the 80s – the movement would eventually coalesce the three founders in its wave. “Vaporwave had tapped into memories that many people had shared and recognised but had previously been inert and just outside of our conscious recollection,” says Evan. Inevitably, more and more people with an unlimited internet access to design history became interested in orbiting aesthetics and thus the project led to the creation of Cari, opening up the breadth of the research tenfold.
Illustration by Elle Studio (1990s) scanned from NM5: New Media Showcase (1995)
“From ‘Blob World’ to ‘Bubblegum Bling’, ‘Corporate Grunge’ to ‘Gay Nineties Revival’, Cari proves that there’s nothing too niche to care about – and this makes consumers feel seen.”
Paul Moore
Cari’s coinages
Cari and its eight team members are quietly some of the most influential archivists online. One of Sofi Xian’s coinages is Frutiger Aero, a branch of Futurist design that fixated around glossy textures, cloudy skies, tropical fish, water and bubbles – seen in Windows XP and late 2000s user interfaces. Conversely, preceding aesthetics such as Utopian Scholastic, coined by Evan Collins, has a thematology of dinosaurs, solar system facts, the human body and contemporary history, all seen in late 90s education texts – although the two aesthetics seem very different, they’re genetically related and serve as springboards into eccentric family trees of design trends. Just a little time spent on CARI, Aesthetics Wikia or Evan’s prolific Are.na will have you reeling from information overload.
From “Blob World” to “Bubblegum Bling”, “Corporate Grunge” to “Gay Nineties Revival”, Cari proves that there’s nothing too niche to care about – and this makes consumers feel seen. A lot of artists know how it feels to be obsessed with a certain look or feel, only to be met with people who can’t see the vision. Do you love the world of “blobjects”, translucent plastic and wearable technology? Then “Y2K Futurism” is the one for you. Do you love the earthy tones of pop surrealism and tribal iconography? Then “Global Village Coffeehouse” it is then!
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Promotional piece for Toybrary by Michael McPherson, and Skolos, Wedell + Raynor scanned from the 1986 Print Magazine Regional Design Annual
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Promotional piece for Toybrary by Michael McPherson, and Skolos, Wedell + Raynor scanned from the 1986 Print Magazine Regional Design Annual
Stock image by Asadal Design of South Korea (2000s)
How does Cari identify aesthetics?
Cari attempts to keep the process of identifying and categorising aesthetics “as democratic as possible.” Members typically carry out independent research, looking into colour schemes, iconography, materiality, themes, production techniques, etc. “It’s also helpful if those proposing a newly discovered style are able to also identify some social, cultural and economic forces behind its rise and fall – and relationships to other identified aesthetics,” says Evan. “We’d discuss and debate whether it was a cohesive and distinct style. These conversations themselves would usually also inspire others to begin their own research or start groups to investigate a style they were particularly interested in.”
For some, explaining why something feels like it’s from a certain time period or has a particular vibe can be difficult to explain, but Cari’s archives offer clear and accessible pathways into understanding consumer semiotics. For example, a consumer product like the blue iMac G3 can be seen as a seminal piece of the Y2K aesthetic, with ABS translucent plastic (inspired by the Bondi Beach) that allows end users to peer into its inner workings – similar to see-through GameBoys, the Kodak DC240i Zoom and kids’ science toys.
Cari doesn’t so much have an answer for why an era like the noughties incorporated so many water textures, glassy materials and platinum utopias in its consumer products, but Cari can present the design trends exactly how they are – like preserving a fragment of the past’s aesthetic interests in amber.
Capitalism = Consumer
Capitalism, for better or for worse, is a hotbed of aesthetic-making. Cari gives us the opportunity to see visual movements that have survived long enough or became popular enough to be appropriated by capital – and how ideas and inspirations proliferate over time. For example, green leaves feature as a recurring motif in nature-inspired aesthetics – but we can see it become reappropriated into consumer products and their user interfaces, such as “eco battery mode” on laptops or electric commercial vehicles. Signifiers of “green energy” became popular from the mid-2000s and became appropriated into symbols that can be seen in Rainforest Chic, Frutiger Eco and Solarpunk. Essentially, through widespread consumerism, design motifs become ingrained into our lives and thus live on in a hauntological sense, especially when aesthetics get caught in their own feedback loops. “It speaks a lot about the sheer power of capitalism that there seem to be so many consumer aesthetics,” says Sofi.
The aesthetic Dollar Store Vernacular is a fascinating case study in how we understand the aesthetics of consumerism. The aesthetic’s “cheap” look and feel, commonly surrounding fast fashion, fast food and fast merchandising, intuitively informs us of what looks “professional” by understanding what looks “unprofessional”. It’s deeply class related – we can see poorer economies through their dated usage of skeuomorphic graphics or their counterfeit consumer culture (in China, this phenomenon is called shanzhai). On modern browsers, ad-block technology is widely available – the consequences of which make the aesthetics of pop-ups a class symbol. Those in working backgrounds may recall childhoods surrounded in product design that looks like it was made with early 2000’s Microsoft Powerpoint graphics. Personally, I have developed a fondness for those maximalist chicken shop menu boards, which have become personally synonymous with when financial times were tough.
Fish - Cover for Think Tank Magazine (1986) Illustration by Motohisa Ieda scanned from Airbrush Art in Japan 4 (1992)
Lingscars.com website, designed by Ling Valetine (2000s)
Gentle Giants canned dog food, designed by Burt Ward & Tracy Ward (2009)
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Cover of the book, Millennium Mode (1999) photography and design by Trudy Schlatchter
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Cover of the book, Millennium Mode (1999) photography and design by Trudy Schlatchter
“I think we can gain a much better understanding of our own current and recent societal context through our cultural production, which in this period is mainly consumer products, spaces, media, and advertising.”
Evan Collins
Digital archaeology
The “paperless future” has partially failed art and design (with some fighting to keep print alive). The once promising alternative: websites, are now racked with social media censorship, the loss of MySpace, wide amounts of content being taken off Tumblr and devastating lawsuits to the Internet Archive. Cari, along with other digitally inspired art enthusiasts, such as the fashion and culture podcast Nymphet Alumni, study and save design relics from being inevitably forgotten within capitalism. Today, generative AI could easily use human-fronted archives to create convincing fakes, which stresses the importance of the keen eye of internet archivists to parse through the rubbish. It is all fine and well to replicate the surface level gloom of dead malls that entice us all, but what is a consumer aesthetic if there are no consumers?
Evan fittingly compares Cari to a crew of digital archaeologists, who decipher cultures of ancient societies through their visual artefacts. “I think we can gain a much better understanding of our own current and recent societal context through our cultural production, which in this period is mainly consumer products, spaces, media and advertising,” says Evan.
Froyo points towards the phenomenon of “brat summer” as an example of analysing design trends as akin to visual anthropology. “People sold brat everything, from drinks, crop tops, baby tees. Brat became a prefix. Even Charli said Kamala Harris was brat,” says Froyo. “This is a lifestyle packaged to sell the idea of being unapologetic. In the end, many people outside of the internet sphere still were not aware of Charli. Charli is an individual, just one piece within the overall pop culture. It’s misguided to only focus on one individual, instead we should analyse the bigger zeitgeist within sociopolitical contexts that produce people like Charli.”
Product brochure image for the WallData Corporation by Glenn Mitsui of Studio MD & Stephen Pennon of Tim Girvin Design (1990s) scanned from Issue 019 of Step-by-Step Design Japan (1999)
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Wrapped Up in Lies editorial image for Kiwanis by Ed Lowe, Philip Howe, and Dianne Bartley (1990s) scanned from Digital Focus: The New Media of Photography (1997)
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Wrapped Up in Lies editorial image for Kiwanis by Ed Lowe, Philip Howe, and Dianne Bartley (1990s) scanned from Digital Focus: The New Media of Photography (1997)
“With our research, I’m hoping people are not just appreciating this archive of design but also reflecting on how we function as a media-oriented superorganism.”
Sofi Xian
The state of mourning
The key phrase is “lifestyle package”. If you go to any Vaporwave music mix on YouTube, you’ll see hundreds of comments lamenting the past, sharing anecdotes of a bygone time, rejoicing in melancholic nostalgia and fond memories. “I want to live in Japanese 80s commercials,” says one commenter. “Capitalism never tasted so good,” says another. I, too, want to live inside of a 90s McDonald’s advert. All aesthetics sell a different version of the world – and there’s enough for everyone to pick their fancy. When a lifestyle package is unwrapped, thoroughly used, then binned, a hole opens up in consumers’ lives, one that they must fill with a new lifestyle aesthetic.
We live in a cultural cycle of mourning, with every generation grieving the last. Everything goes out of fashion eventually, especially trends. All aesthetics, at one point or another, fall out of the public’s favour, keel over, and explode into a million creative spores that spread across the media-scape. And with that, new ecosystems of visuals, attitudes, interests and aesthetics are born. Perhaps it’s not that subcultures are dying, but that they’re becoming increasingly microscopic and bespoke for particular consumers – they may no longer dominate culture the way they used to, but now exist in more ambient fashions, quietly shaping our ways of life.
Look around and ask yourself: why is that there? Why does it look that way? What kind of bigger story is this fitting into? Where did it come from and where will it go? Everything is embedded in a larger context. Consumer aesthetics offer an expansive study for our human condition – and Cari presents the information in an unbiased, non-judgmental and educational fashion. Design trends – as maximalist visual commentaries on the way we think, feel and accessorise – become a picture you can infinitely zoom into. They become an opportunity to find new documents hidden within – artefacts that simultaneously light both paths to the past and the future.
The Mindwarp by Maxis Software (never-released PC game) t-shirt, designer unknown, likely in-house (1996 or 1997)
Media Plaza - Utrecht, The Netherlands (1997 & expansion in 2000) designed by Sander Architecten
Hero Header
Stock Image 345021 from the Fast Forward collection designed by Sara Hayward scanned from Fusion by
DigitalVision Ltd (1999)
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About the Author
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Paul M (He/Him) is a Junior Writer at It’s Nice That since May 2025 as well as a published poet and short fiction writer. He studied (BA) Fine Art and has a strong interest in digital kitsch, multimedia painting, collage, nostalgia, analog and all matters of strange stuff.