Aesthetics, Trends And Identity Performance

How the internet turned us all into moodboards.

- M Vinayak

You used to be someone. Or maybe, you still are—but now you’re also a Pinterest board, a photo dump, a curated playlist, and three different aesthetics depending on the app. One day, you’re a soft girl sipping tea in filtered morning light, the next you’re in your villain era, stomping through a breakup soundtrack. Who are you, really? Depends on the scroll.

This is life now—not just lived, but performed. Online. All the time. And not just through words or actions, but through aesthetics—those dreamy, coded, colour-graded fragments of selfhood we use to say “this is me” without ever saying it out loud. From slime ASMR and matcha lattes to ballet flats and trauma-core memes, the visual language of the internet has become a full-blown dialect of identity. We no longer just ask “Who am I?” We ask, “What’s my vibe today?”

What started as a way to self-express has spiraled into something bigger, blurrier, and way more complicated. Aesthetics are no longer just about what we wear or like—they're about who we are allowed to be. And the rules keep changing.

For Gen Alpha, the youngest digital natives, aesthetics arrive preinstalled. They're born into a world of rainbow pop-its, satisfying textures, Minecraft architecture, and YouTube thumbnails bursting with hyper-saturated colour. Their childhood memories won't be scribbled in notebooks—they'll live in pixels and slime videos. These are their lullabies, their comfort zones. For them, visual storytelling isn't a learned skill. It's instinct.