A lot of people might be quick to look at the clothes I wear, the furniture in my kitchen, or the decor in my living room and assume my obsession with all things vintage stems from an appreciation of vintage aesthetics. They’re half-correct: I do love the bright, colorful, semi-absurdism of Memphis Milano, the retro-futuristic neon-laser-grid contours of mid-1980s software packaging, and the glossy, low-quality CGI that defined the early 2000s. But there’s a bit more to it than that.
At the core, I’m simply obsessed with the concept of time.
Maybe not so much time itself, but more the passage of time. I’m obsessed with the ephemerality and transience of all things as the entropy of the universe clears out what once was for what will be. Ever since I was in high school, there was something haunting about old ‘90s commercial compilations on YouTube, or the binder full of old Pokemon cards in my parents’ basement. It’s as much an adoration of the objects and visuals themselves as much as an appreciation for the fact that they no longer are what they once were.
In a way, it makes all too much sense that, in 2021, I found myself in a rather unusual, but serendipitous, situation: somehow, it was silently agreed upon that I would become the tech director for the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (aka CARI). My big lockdown project was simply a way to pass the time by myself, in isolation from the outside world: build a website (well, a CMS, technically speaking).
I had stumbled upon the Discord server for the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute sometime in 2020, realizing that they had grown significantly since the days of the Y2K Aesthetic Institute, a Tumblr blog that focused specifically on the Y2K Aesthetic (obviously). It was pretty simple: they had a very rudimentary website with no content - essentially a placeholder. After a few weeks, I decided it might be fun to put my programming skills to use and design a few mockups for potential features for the website once it went live.
After about two weeks of Ballmer peaking my way to an entire client-server model web app, I realized I had unintentionally built an entire functional website. And as luck would have it, CARI’s directors - the venerable Froyo Tam and Evan Collins - decided it would be great to take it live.
According to Cloudflare, we got over 300,000 hits in our first month online alone. A few months later, I was officially made an admin.
Most people who discover CARI stumble upon it via informational TikToks describing identified and named aesthetics, or via the many news articles that have either cited CARI directly, or made use of our work. They see the cool pictures, feel a sense of nostalgia or intrigue, and enter the rabbit hole from there. After all, that’s how I got involved.
But CARI isn’t just about the visuals, or the feeling you get from looking at the graphics we’ve found and cataloged.
To me, I’ve always viewed CARI as a research group that studies the passage of time as it manifests in popular design trends. Every aesthetic arises among unique social, political, and economic conditions. As these conditions change, so do new aesthetics emerge. As these aesthetics are worn out via repetitive mass-production and mass-marketing, so do they fade, allowing new ones to take their place.
You can never feel the way you did in the 1990s as you do now. But at the same time, you feel the exact same now as you did back then. Nothing feels too special about now, at least compared to yesterday, or last week, and you can say that about just about any discrete point in time - even if it’s decades ago. Isn’t it an odd paradox? Somehow, just the passage of time alone is enough to give weight to the weightless.
Important to keep in mind is that these trends are almost always only identified retroactively. At best, you can identify an aesthetic while it’s still active, but you can never truly get in on the ground floor. But at the same time, you’re alive and going to Target or McDonald’s while new aesthetics are being used for product packaging and advertisements in real time, so you really are there to witness their rise. Strange paradox, isn’t it?
Time seems to dictate how, and not just when, we make sense of our senses.
Earlier today, December 21st, I felt the urge to take a nighttime bike ride. It’s one of the rare Atlanta Decembers where it should be in the 30s or 40s, but instead, it’s in the 50s. I decided to bike my usual route: from my Kirkwood home, to the Beltline, up to Piedmont Park and then back. But today, for some reason, I felt the urge to stop at Ponce City Market.
For a popular mall in a big city in December, Ponce City Market is unusually under-decorated for the holiday season. Which is fine by me, especially on a night like tonight where I decided I’d venture into the Williams-Sonoma and do field research for CARI. I hadn’t been inside a Williams-Sonoma since I was an 11-year-old accompanying my mom, why not see if I can appreciate their products as an adult?
I’m not sure I can conclusively say there’s any specific consumer aesthetic about the selection of products. A lot of the time, things don’t really have one. But the thought donned on me: if I took a picture right here, right now, and didn’t look at it again until 2040, would I look at it with a sense of nostalgia and longing? Would everything in the photo look “vintage?”
It’s very difficult to say. Terms like “vintage” and “contemporary” are relative terms to right now. Sufficient time is required to make sense of the things we see, hear, and experience. Holistic judgment is impossible without reference points as anchors.
But I’d wager the answer is probably “yes.”
I've been considering taking photos of current day retail spaces simply as a resource for groups like CARI in the future.
Also, I wanted to share that I regularly go to estate sales and every once in a while I'll step into a house that is a snap shot of a certain time period. Based on the recency of products you can pinpoint the year that the inhabitants stopped trying to keep up with certain trends. I've been to many houses that don't have products newer than the mid-2000s aside from perishables or possibly a modern TV. It's wild! I recommend if you've never gone.