This is not just true of “preppy.” If you are a teenager or have exposure to teenagers, what I am about to write is something you probably know already. Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics and music around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed.
What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any “real life” anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.
For proof, you need only log on to Aesthetics Wiki, a wonderfully encyclopedic website for online style tribes. Here you will find not only large categories like emo, Y2K, VSCO, academia or the perennial goth but also categories so specific that their nicheness begins feeling like an Escher staircase of references. The roughly 200 aesthetics found under the randomly chosen letter M contain some that will be legible to many (Memphis rap, Mod), some that involve a kind of style-sensitive hairsplitting (Mallgoth, Messy French It Girl, McBling) and others that are just full-on W.T.F.: Meatcore is for people who appreciate raw meat as a nondietary object, and Monumentality is the appreciation of anything big, like Godzilla, Gothic cathedrals, giant redwoods or asteroids (“many asteroids are fairly large”). It’s hard to imagine a Monumentality meetup because, like so many aesthetics, Monumentality is only referential, its conversation ending right where it begins: Do you like this big thing? Yes, because it is big.
Subcultures have largely collapsed.
As with much of today’s popular culture (say, A.S.M.R. hair-brushing or pimple-popping videos), the level of specificity and intimate itch-scratching here feels a lot like porn — another extension of the internet’s ability to service niche desires. And in terms of their enhancement of human experience, many aesthetics seem to offer about as much as porn does: a fleeting personal pleasure to be had mainly alone.