VIBE SHIFTS/GLAM HIPSTERS/CLEAN LINES/ MOD OPTIMIZATION/EPIC MEALTIME/ BEING CONFUSED ABOUT HOW TO HAVE FUN
Hiii! I’m sorry for the delay, it has simply been a week. So here’s this fun treat and this week mayyyy even hold a double-feature to make it up to you xxxx
VIBE SHIFTS
^ Cory Kennedy by the Cobrasnake, ofc
This article by Alison P. Davis about vibe shifts came out last week (two weeks ago?? Time is a flat circle). And boy was everyone talking about it!
This piece is about how we’re at the tail end of a visual-cultural era, and about to enter into a mysterious new one. What will it be? We hear some potential predictions from trend forecaster Sean Monahan. The piece is fun, nothing terribly extraordinary in my mind. I’m not really sure why it was subject of such buzz, which leaves me to think that rather than it being explosive in content, it hit a nerve culturally. Mostly the piece talks about how a new trend is coming, but we’re not sure what it is yet.
In my mind, that’s a little similar to saying ‘there is weather today, and also! There will be weather, tomorrow, too!’
The article concludes with an image of the Double: a story where a young woman who is dressed like she lives in 2008, talking to a guy who looks like he ‘never updated his style since 2008’. She cosplays a time period that defined him, wearing clothes from a year in which she would likely have been 7. Not long after reading this piece, I watched the latest Euphoria episode, which is titled “The Theater and It’s Double”. Shadow vibes!
Monahan’s answer seems to suggest that the next wave will be the hipster glam late 2000s and early 2010s.
I’m not terribly interested in ‘forecasting’, but man oh man do I love to daydream and hypothesize J So! If the ‘vibe shift’ is soon to lead towards the late 2000s- early 2010s (let’s say 2007-2013 ish), what foods might end up resurfacing?
This is not to say, what will we be eating? Food should not be a throwback accessory, and it definitely shouldn’t be ironic. What I’m asking is: what were the definitive food ‘vibes’ of that moment? What did food look like when we had side bangs and were listening to the first Vampire Weekend album?
I’m going to highlight three standout themes, and then some honorable mentions. Sometimes, it’s simply fun to remember J Let’s begin!
VITAMIN WATER
Even drinking this as a kid, I felt chic. Vitamin Water is simply that! Water containing vitamins. There was something fun about matching color to flavor to purpose. Light pink//focus//strawberry kiwi. VitaminWater, according to the inital branding team, was designed to “fill the gap” between soft drinks and water for people who “should be drinking more water but weren’t”. 50 Cent was such a fan that he became a Glaceau partner.
It was an answer to Gatorade, it was yummy, the branding was straightforward, the colors were fun.
Vitamin water also channeled a colorful minimalism that was so important to the moment. Solid backgrounds, with a focal pop. You can’t not think about the American Apparel and Terry Richardson aesthetic when you look at early Vitamin water ads like the one above. 60’s mod with the cleanness of the original Microsoft Apple.
Makes life seem so simple, no?
EPIC MEALTIME
I mean… I could spend all day on this type of food media. EpicMealtime, for those fortunate enough to not know, was a show where guys would make supremely large meals made out of things like Big Macs and cheese wiz and bacon. One of the most famous videos is ‘fast food lasagna’ in which they simply layer and bake big macs, bacon, and cheese together. Then they all eat it, and sit facing the camera, like one imagines it was at the Last Supper.
^I spy at least 2 American Apparel items in this pic! Almost too easy :)
EpicMealtime wasn’t dissimilar to Jackass. Here were some fame-curious soldiers who would do the things that some part of our id craves but that we ourselves would never do. So we get to see people doing it, and be disgusted with them and with ourselves and also get a little hungry during the making of the food, which is perverse. My favorite part of this video is when they’re at McDonald’s and he gives an apple pie to a lady and her family, as long as she will watch his video. Makes me think of Drake’s God’s Plan video, where he passes out money (which is admittedly much sweeter and more philanthropic). But still – sometimes a man gives his surplus to others, and yet also to literally himself.
Supersize Me came out in 2004 and was a documentary about Morgan Spurlock eating exclusively McDonald’s for every meal for a month. It is harrowing, and I remember there being a little animations of sick chickens being killed. There definitely was a unique fascination with McDonald’s, more than any other fast food chain, in the early aughts. The metaphor is almost too literal – if abundant burgers are supposed to represent the classic American meal, and actually they’re hurting us… what does that mean about what this country is feeding us? Is this system healthy?
Now, this curiosity and anger surrounding one specific chain feels dated because the world has gotten grimmer, and there are more pressing collective concerns than the badness of McDonald’s.
I will posit that Epic Mealtime’s insistence on the abundance of burgers might be seen as a reclamation of hedonistic unhealthiness and grotesque saturation. Though these men are certainly no James Dean, they do seem to desperately want us to watch them break the rules. I’ll even go as far as to say that without Epic Mealtime, Vice Munchies would have never been born :o just a lot of dudes, having a wild and crazy time, looking at food, saying “fuck”.
CUPCAKES
Before I start, just so everyone knows: one of my favorite treats is a chocolate cupcake with blue frosting from Magnolia Bakery. It’s not too sweet for me! So if you ever want to bring me a treat… just saying! Okay.
People have said that the SATC episode where Carrie and Miranda are having cupcakes (at Magnolia Bakery) inspired the 2000s cupcake craze. I think that may be a little too much credit
to Carrie and Miranda, but you never know.
Cupcakes are a funny one. They make logistical sense. It’s nice not to need a fork. They’re economical because they build cake up as opposed to slices, which have a greater surface area to volume ratio. They’re whimsical, not terribly messy, pretty satisfying if they’re the right size.
Around this time, Pinterest was also starting to happen and the DIY aesthetic of decoration was blooming. If you had a muffin tin, you could make cupcakes. If you baked cupcakes, you could style them. Here was an aesthetic opportunity that was not terribly hard to access. So people jumped into ‘gourmet cupcakes’, so much so that the Food Network even put out Cupcake Wars. If you watch the trailer, you’ll see that the show pictured an animated cupcake as a tank of sorts.
This one really gets me, and I don’t think it’s really worth dissecting because it is so strange and uncomfortable. But I do think that it connects to something else I have noticed: the randomness with the way that people tried to brand cupcakes.
I’ll elaborate. 2009 is the year that the Recession came to a close, and it’s also when we start to see some very strange and surreal cupcake rebrands. These usually have to do with re-shifting what cupcakes look like and how we buy and sell them. I wonder if the new sense of financial stability left marketers jabbing at what the public was interested in, now that they might be able to spend their money on things like cupcakes.
The Sprinkles ATM… wtf. An automat for boxed cupcakes. Where do they come from? Are we to think that cupcakes are like cash?
The Baked by Melissa cupcakes always looked cool but tiny cupcakes are actually not that fun! How many is one person supposed to eat? Certainly not just one. Just make a full cupcake!
And do not get me started on the weird Cake/Cup trend. This solved no problems at all.
Anyway, I feel like the cupcake takeaway was that they were cute but also that they were a form of portable indulgence. I shan’t take it back to Marie Antoinette yet again, but I will say that if cake typically represents some form of celebration, what does it mean to be able to take a little bit of it wherever you go? And then, what does it mean when it’s rebooted over and over, updated and optimized to reformat shape? Perhaps there’s a struggle in how we are supposed to go about enjoying something.
I’ll conclude with this picture. No idea where this is from, but it’s funny.
YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL
As I reflect on these little themes, I come away with sensing this cultural desire to have. I’m not really even talking about possession of material things, but more a desire to hold something, and maybe two things at once. Funnily enough, that is the definition of irony — for something to be meaningful and meaningless at the same time.
An effort to consume vitamins while also hydrating. To hydrate at all. To hydrate with every color. To have fun and be clean all at once.
To eat an extraordinary amount of meat, as a joke, because you can. To make videos of that consumption, to commemorate immense surplus. We record things because we know they will not last.
To eat a tiny cake, in a shape that does not – cannot possibly-- dissatisfy you.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
-The massive bacon trend. Bacon on everything. chocolate bacon.
-Pinkberry and fro yo. Pinkberry, especially.
-Bowls! Acai, Chipotle, Kardashian salads.
-Sexy hamburgers (all the Carl’s Jr ads)
-Smoothies (Jamba Juice/liquiteria)
OK thank you for reading <333 lmk if you think of anything I missed