You’re in 10th grade, approaching your fifth Zoom class of the day, and you’ve learned nothing. Autumn might be near, but you remain frozen on March 13, 2020, the day the pandemic turned what was supposed to be a two-week vacation into a two-year hiatus from normalcy. You’ve been silently rotting in your dirty bedroom for months, only interacting with your mom when she brings up a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and with your equally exhausted classmates — most of them strangers to you — in breakout rooms. You have lost yourself. The world is enveloped in constant social chaos and financial upheaval, and all you can do is log in and log off as it burns to the ground. There is still no cure. Every adult you know is talking about these “unprecedented times,” this doomed future, yet in the same breath they tell you to pick a college and a life to live. Everything is moving too fast. You wonder, “How could it be that less than a year ago everything was fine?”
You need an escape.
You turn your camera off — if you were brave enough to even have it on in the first place, brave enough to broadcast to your class the state of your misery (and your room).
And you open Pinterest.
What greets you is a hyper-saturated world of teenage perfection. You see bedrooms meticulously decorated with album covers, cow print and Monster Energy cans. Groups of teens just like you wear floral bucket hats and listen to Rex Orange County. The sun is always shining in this vibrant micro-world, and they are always outside. Strangely, they never do much else. They languish in the grass, ride their skateboards at sunset and head over to 7/11 for slushies that swirl in idyllic shades of icy blue and pink. You can’t get enough.
After all, it’s the life you once had.
Perhaps it’s for that very reason why millions of Gen-Zers latched onto this aesthetic so fiercely at the height of its popularity. The fascination with Y2K was beginning its return via butterfly clips, eccentric layered beads, striped rainbow shirts and colorful linked chains that you could hang off of your jeans. The look occasionally possessed a psychedelic tie-dyed haze with smiley faces and mushrooms, the latter of which proved its dual usage between wholesome cottagecore girlies and stoner chicks. The Build-A-Bear frog became the mascot for this new age as people dressed him in his own trendy outfits, stickers and rainbows (2020 was an unexpectedly huge year for frog appreciation). Now known as the “indie kid” aesthetic, these fluorescent images of youth have become a time capsule of what the internet was like during quarantine. While the “indie kid” term was ironic (many artists cherished within the aesthetic like Clairo and Wallows were incredibly mainstream), the subculture was more than just cutesy Lizzie McGuire clones going thrifting in an eternal summer.
Aesthetic trends often result from knowing what we can’t have but striving for it anyway. The current resurgence of twee can be linked to a growing desire for handmade, imperfect objects in an age of artificial intelligence. The “downtown girl” represents a yearning for urban life as cities become more financially impossible to live in amid an incoming recession. And of course, when we were all damned to isolation as COVID-19 seeped into the new normal, people yearned to return to what we had taken for granted: the expected high school experience. From early 2020 to late 2021, the exact runtime of the heydey for the “indie kid,” students were denied a true graduation and, despite hybrid efforts, a proper school-life balance. With the “indie kid” aesthetic came the romanticization of convenience stores and football bleachers, a growing itch to see friends in-person — in the mundane.
Perhaps it is because the pandemic struck at the precise moment when Gen-Z was beginning to grow up, but there was a genuine grief surrounding the fact that life hadn’t felt mundane since before the pandemic started. The innate awkward wistfulness of the teen years was amplified by the fact that teenagers had been denied the opportunity to let go of childhood in a natural way. The chance to grow up on your own terms was robbed from so many young people the second quarantine began, which, truthfully, most people seem to have not properly processed in its wake. There was a reverting of sorts, a return to bits and pieces of the 2000s merging with harmless love songs and colors so bright and fuzzy it seemed like the world took place through the wide eyes of a child, a child that most students in this time period never got to be. On the surface, the “indie kid” era seemed like a silly mindless symptom of a chronically online generation. But the truth is clear — for many, it was coping by creating an alternate reality.
It’s been five years since March 13, 2020. In my heart, the trend that was grounded in nostalgia has looped back to be nostalgic in and of itself. There’s something endearing about those sparkle-infused TikToks that showcased perfectly symmetrical photo walls enshrouded by fake ivy or, amusingly, close-ups of basic everyday entities like sunlight and shoes, suddenly gaining a higher significance once we could not go outside. It was weirdly mindful, encouraging viewers to take in the simple everyday details — the opportunity of a candy aisle, the grooves of a sidewalk on the corner, the freedom of sitting on your roof.
The heavy reliance on bold neon (and the rather infamous checkerboard pattern) was a far cry from the current fixation on unassuming neutrals and earth tones. TikTok was still a brand-new platform, and there was an excitement brewing over how this kind of content was rapidly influencing the fashion sphere. It’s only natural that an attempt at a subculture would be made through this new medium as a response to the grim realities outside our bedroom windows, heavily relying on DIY projects and small outdoor reprieves as the fuel for its fire. The way the aesthetic embraces youth is refreshing in the bleak year of 2025, when TikTok has now become a haven of 11-year-olds layering themselves in adult makeup in a desperate attempt to seem older, as well as the epicenter for a rise in constraining tradwife beauty techniques. There is still a plethora of fun content on TikTok, but it’s not as uniform as it felt in the era of the indie kid, and aesthetics come and go much faster now than they did before. I miss the deliberate nature of the indie kid, the innocent bright colors and the intense escapism it offered. I no longer sense that idea of escape in current trends — if anything, the dread is amplified.
I will forever defend the “indie kid” aesthetic era because, as brief as it was, it encouraged slow living, a colorful outlook and optimism in the face of the impossible. While it might have been corny and somewhat dated (it is likely to provoke strong quarantine flashbacks in anyone from Gen-Z who recalls the onset of this phenomenon), I can’t help but think back on it fondly.
Daily Arts Writer Bella Casagranda can be reached at ijcasa@umich.edu.
