The Trend Forecaster Who Coined "Vibe Shift" on What Comes Next (with Sean Monahan)

Back Row with Amy Odell

In this episode of The Back Row Podcast, trend forecaster Sean Monahan revisits the 'vibe shift'—a term he coined five years ago to describe

Key takeaways

The 'vibe shift' remains a relevant cultural descriptor for generational dislocation and shifting identity markers.
The 'boom boom aesthetic' reflects a revival of late-80s excess tied to economic anxiety and the rise of new wealth classes like crypto millionaires.

Main topics

The 'vibe shift' five years later
The resurgence of the 'boom boom aesthetic' and its ties to late-80s nostalgia

Notable quotes

"I was trying to see how silly a neologism I could get people to repeat."

"The late 80s was not necessarily a good economic decade for everyone. The deindustrialization, the stock market growing in a bubble and then popping."

Conclusion

Sean Monahan's reflections underscore the enduring power of cultural language like 'vibe shift' while highlighting how

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Do you remember the vibe shift of 2021 slash 2022? It's a term coined by Sean Monaghan to describe the unease millennials felt coming out of the pandemic when youth culture started coming from Gen Z's instead of them, leaving us unmoored from what was cool. Monaghan is a trend forecaster and founder of the trend forecasting firm K-Hole. He consults for brands like Nike and he writes the 8-Ball Substack newsletter. I read it religiously because I want to know how Monaghan sees the current culture. I like the way he approaches trend forecasting because he doesn't just tell you which shoes are coming back into fashion. He tells you what's happening in culture that will lead to a certain type of shoe coming back into fashion. Monaghan has coined other terms that you've probably heard of because they entered the zeitgeist, like normcore and the boom boom aesthetic. In honor of the vibe shift's fifth anniversary, I invited Monaghan on the podcast to talk about the current state of... Well, vibes. When I last interviewed him in 2022, he said tackiness would give way to tastefulness. But has it? What did he get right and wrong about the vibe shift five years ago? I also wanted to get his take on a bunch of other things, like what does he make of all the rage bait and culture today from our Instagram feeds to the Met Gala? What does the fashion industry need to do to recover following its downturn? And how can you even be a trend forecaster in a world where so much of what we see in our feeds is fake? Obviously, I wanted to get Sean's take on the current state of the Met Gala. Note that we recorded before the John Galliano exhibition was canceled. So you'll hear us discuss that, but not the cancellation. Nonetheless, I think that what we talked about is still relevant to the brand of the whole thing. Today, it's Sean Monaghan and the current state of vibes. I'm Amy O'Dell, and this is The Back Row Podcast. Speaker 2 (1:49) I'm here Speaker 1 (1:50) with Sean Monaghan. Sean, thanks for coming on the show. I'm really excited to talk to you. Speaker 2 (1:54) I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Amy. I Speaker 1 (1:56) love your newsletter. I love your predictions. I read it religiously. And we have just come up on the five-year anniversary of the five shift. Speaker 2 (2:06) It's incredible. Another neologism that I'm surprised has stuck around as long as it has. Speaker 1 (2:13) Five shift? Speaker 2 (2:14) Yeah. I don't know. You know, you write something, even if it goes viral, you don't necessarily know if it's going to join kind of. the contemporary lexicon and be something that people continue to use when they're writing and describing the world. Speaker 1 (2:29) You've coined a lot of good things. Normcore, boom boom aesthetic. I've used that. A number of times. I linked you. That one, I Speaker 2 (2:38) think, I was trying to see how silly a neologism I could get people to repeat. Speaker 1 (2:43) Boom boom aesthetic? Yeah. Well, just explain what the boom boom aesthetic is before we get into vibe shift. Speaker 2 (2:47) Yeah, I mean. Speaker 1 (2:48) Because that's sort of like the 80s tackiness. Speaker 2 (2:51) Yeah. It's sort of your Speaker 1 (2:52) view on that. Just explain it. Speaker 2 (2:54) Yeah, there's been a revival. of 80s nostalgia, which makes sense. I always like to say that nostalgia cycles oftentimes daisy chain. So in the 2000s, we had an 80s revival because it was 20 years from the 80s. And so now as we have this kind of Y2K aesthetic 2000s revival, there's also kind of a subgenre that was very 80s inflected. And I think a lot of that had to do with the election of Donald Trump. And at least in 2024, I think people were trying to hope for the best. And... a lot of people were saying, well, maybe I don't agree with a lot of his policies, but it'll at least be good for the economy. That hasn't really turned out to be correct. But I think a lot of people were embracing that kind of late 80s, Patrick Bateman, vice signaling aesthetic in the hopes that that would happen. But I think the irony is, and I wrote about this maybe a year and a half ago, I think, was that that era, actually, the late 80s and early 90s was also a very terrible economic era. People tend to forget about the 1987 crash of the stock market. I think they called it Black Monday. And so like at the same time, when you look back at American Psycho, you're thinking about yuppie aesthetics and this whole new class of financiers that are dominating culture. But at the same time, people tend to forget that the 80s was not necessarily a good economic decade for everyone. The deindustrialization, the stock market growing in a bubble and then popping. Speaker 1 (4:22) And income inequality because Reagan cut taxes for the richest people. And then we had a huge disparity. Yeah. But Speaker 2 (4:28) I love the aesthetic. I mean, I think Saint Laurent was kind of essential to it. They really were going along with the kind of big shoulder pads, this kind of 80s style androgyny. You Speaker 1 (4:38) mean recently? Yeah, Speaker 2 (4:39) about the last two collections, I think, you know. And it's interesting to me also because I for a while I was saying that suits would come back. This was something I started noticing long before the second Trump campaign because I would see it going out. I would be like, what's going on with this is where a lot of these questions start. You see people wearing something or doing something that sticks out like a sore thumb. And you say, why are these 26 year olds going out wearing suits and ties all of a sudden? You know, are they? I see a fair amount. I had one client where I wear Speaker 1 (5:12) everywhere. You were just telling me you've been all over the U.S. Speaker 2 (5:15) mostly. Speaker 1 (5:16) You're in California. In the U.S. Speaker 2 (5:18) mostly. I mean, I talked a lot about this with friends and colleagues in London, and there it doesn't quite click as much because London is still a much more formal business culture, definitely than California, but even than New York. So the idea of wearing a suit and a tie isn't transgressive. I think wearing a suit as a young person is relatively transgressive. There's a lot of business context that I go into that if I went wearing like a tailored double-breasted suit. with like an Hermes tie or something, it would look conspicuous and odd. They'd be wondering why is Sean dressed like this? Because, you know, that business dress is always a bit conformist. You know, you're not trying to be too eccentric. So people listen to you, of course. And so in the 80s, yeah, you would have worn a suit. I mean, maybe not something quite that glamorous, but in the 2020s, certainly not. Definitely not in California and increasingly less so in New York. Speaker 1 (6:08) But the 80s revival, you called the boom boom aesthetic. Speaker 2 (6:11) Yeah, because I think we have a couple of booms going on, right? We have the AI boom. We have the crypto boom. And similar to the 80s, this has created a new class of wealthy people that are trying to figure out where they sit in the status hierarchy. And I think whenever that happens, the first instinct is to go back to basics, which in the US is kind of preppiness or a kind of more tailored business look, because they're trying to be taken seriously. I think like initially a lot of the... crypto set were doing like a kind of late hypebeast thing. I used to make a joke that I think crypto is what really killed streetwear because this is the problem for a lot of people. And it's not just because these are people who are newly wealthy, but just generally people are. much more worried about what to wear and what their taste signifies than people who work in a culture industry. And this is oftentimes forgotten. You know, if you talk to people in fashion, like the secret is that actually workwear is like the top selling fashion item in the United States. And it's been that way forever. And that kind of makes sense. What Speaker 1 (7:15) do Speaker 2 (7:15) you mean by Speaker 1 (7:15) workwear? You mean like utilitarian or going to office? Button Speaker 2 (7:20) down shirts. Yeah, things that, yeah, yeah, office wear. Business casual. Because that's what people care about. That's what they wear most of the day. They want to be perceived in a certain way. And there's a level of conformity to that. And oftentimes they want people to tell them what to wear to some extent. But with crypto, which happened in this moment of mass casualization, it's a little trickier. Like the semiotics of being casual, but seeming like you know what you're doing being casual is harder to crack. And I think because crypto is so focused on just money. on just like line go up number on the screen. A lot of these resale markets, just crazy valuations for limited edition sneakers or hoodies attracted them and that caused like inflation in streetwear. And I think drove out a lot of the people who maybe cared about it in a more sincere or authentic way. I remember one time being at Bitcoin Miami and seeing someone get out of a Lamborghini with this giant Louis Vuitton duffel bag that had like glimmering LED lights. beneath the monogram. He told me about that the last time Speaker 1 (8:24) we talked. Oh my God. And Speaker 2 (8:25) I was just like, this is the most absurd item I've ever seen. I was like, this is just over. It's blown up too much. It's become a parody of itself, you know? Speaker 1 (8:34) Okay. But you just touched on something that I want to talk about, which was like anxiety. That's what, why the vibe shift caught fire. I think, I mean, tell me if you disagree. I would say Speaker 2 (8:45) norm core too. That also clocked into a certain anxiety about. Well, I think normcore was the shift that happened in the early 2010s where people stopped trying to be hipsters. They stopped trying to appear special and unique in their style and started to embrace conspicuously blank clothing. So like the classic thing that me and my colleagues at K-Hole used to say was that all of a sudden all of our artist friends had stopped wearing like different kind of weird bespoke boots that they had found at vintage stores and started wearing. the exact same make and model of a Nike shoe, the Nike Free in black always. And I think, you know, there were a couple of things going on here. This was like the rise of athleisure. This first boom in Silicon Valley, which had much more to do with Web 2 and social media, had kind of Mark Zuckerberg as their spirit animal, who famously, at least in the movie, which everyone forgets is not him. It's, you know, Jesse Eisenberg. You know, he wears his like Adidas slides and schlubby jeans and hoodie to business meetings. So there was also kind of a West Coast influence in that. But there was anxiety about being perceived as trying to be overly special or unique because hipsterdom had kind of blown that up to such an extent that, like with streetwear, it began to seem inauthentic and kind of corny. And, you know, so ultimately the norm thing was about status. It was about trying to seem cool. Speaker 1 (10:11) And the aesthetic, I guess maybe I'm wearing a white t-shirt. But this is kind of a classic thing Speaker 2 (10:16) in different creative industries. Yeah, the aesthetic was jeans. It was athleisure. L.L. Bean. Chinos. Yeah. Chinos. Speaker 1 (10:26) It Speaker 2 (10:26) was New Balancers. I believe New Balancers became like very associated with this. Speaker 1 (10:31) That's right. Yeah. But Speaker 2 (10:32) it was trying to, I mean, the joke was it was. cool New Yorkers trying to dress like Midwestern tourists. And there was something conspicuous about this because of who was doing it, right? Yeah. It was the fact that it was cool downtown New Yorkers trying to dress like Midwestern tourists. Midwestern tourists dressing like Midwestern tourists is not that interesting. That's kind of expected. But it did have to do with this anxiety about being a tryhard in your style and the fact that curators or fashion designers or fashion journalists, oftentimes, canonically, they wear black. Or even like say an Alexander McQueen wears like slubby jeans and a t-shirt when he walks out at the end of the runway. And this has kind of been taken up by Jonathan Anderson, right? You know, he wears his Salomon sneakers when he emerges at the end. So it's kind of like the most elite people don't Speaker 1 (11:18) need Speaker 2 (11:18) to worry about seeming cool because they are cool. And to, you know, wear these kind of conspicuous hipster outfits. Speaker 1 (11:25) If you enjoy this podcast, you'll also love my Back Row newsletter. It's a publication covering fashion, power, and the money behind it all. The stuff that legacy media wouldn't print. Fashion and culture journalism without the PR gloss. Sign up for a premium subscription and you'll get access to all paywalled podcasts along with the newsletter. Subscribe at backrow.net slash subscribe and I'll also drop the link in the show notes. Yeah. So that was Norm Kaur. And would you say that preceded vibe shift of 2021? Speaker 2 (11:56) I mean, the way I think about it is that the vibe shift was a kind of return to hipsterdom in some ways. It was a return to these kind of small scene politics. Saw this op-ed in the New York Times. About how Speaker 1 (12:11) Gen Z can't dress? Speaker 2 (12:12) Yeah, about how they've been wearing crazy outfits. I saw a bit of this in Marseille. Like if someone's wearing like... culottes with like hunter rain boots and some like gauzy white tunic shirt like you know these things are all kind of mashed together and it reminds me a lot of so Speaker 1 (12:28) you think gen z's are just recycling our hipster stuff of yours i don't i Speaker 2 (12:32) don't know that it's but more colorful certainly the y2k aesthetic that was really prominent a couple of years ago is conspicuously um nostalgic and they're They're like the shield sunglasses and for all mankind jeans and low rise and skinny jeans coming back. The tube tops actually downstream of like slightly different cultural forces. Like I do think like in this op-ed what he says, it's because you can kind of order anything from a fast fashion retailer and have it in two days and kind of put together these odd outfits. It's a bit, it's people are dressing transgressively again. Right. And I think both the boom boom aesthetic by going hyper conservative, hyper traditional is conspicuous in a different way. But this is kind of the opposite of that, of trying to look not put together. Yes. Trying to look unique and really treating fashion semiotics as something that you can kind of rewrite yourself. You can decide what to put together. You don't have to listen to other people about what looks good. That's downstream of digital shopping today, the plethora of options. But I think in the 2000s, a lot of it was downstream of the exhaustion of the lack of options at the mall and millennials turning to thrift stores to find these like odd clothing items. Do you remember the ugly sweater trend of the Speaker 1 (13:55) 2000s? I do. Speaker 2 (13:57) Like I went to art school. Like I went to art school from 2005 to 2009. And especially in the earlier bit of that. people would just find the most insane, hideous sweaters, like just, you know, bedazzled, clearly from like the late 80s, early 90s, ugly, but trying to show that you have a mastery of aesthetics by making something ugly look cool. Speaker 1 (14:16) Yep. Yep. Okay. Like what Mutra Prada does. Okay. So, but the vibe, we keep meandering from five shift, but so Speaker 2 (14:23) that Speaker 1 (14:23) caught fire, I think, well, I guess you coined it in 21, but I think it caught fire. in 2022 because Alison Davis wrote about it for New York Magazine. Because it Speaker 2 (14:34) had made everyone feel insecure. Well, Speaker 1 (14:36) yeah, because we were coming out, her whole sort of angle in her piece was that we were coming out of the pandemic and millennials didn't know what culture was anymore. They didn't know what trends were anymore. They didn't know how to dress. They didn't know what we didn't know was cool. And your story about the vibe, you're like, yeah, the vibe. Speaker 2 (14:52) No one knows what to do anymore. Well, it was caught fire because we all Speaker 1 (14:56) had this anxiety. We're like, oh, my God, what is the new vibe? But why do you think it caught fire? Do you think I'm right? Do you think that's why? I Speaker 2 (15:02) do think it was about millennial anxiety, because when I wrote it, the initial post, it was right after New York reopened. OK. And. There was kind of mass accessibility of vaccines. Speaker 1 (15:14) Hot vac summer. I wrote Speaker 2 (15:15) it in June 21. Yeah, and it was crazy. There was crazy energy. But something that I noticed amongst my friends who were all in their mid-30s at that time was that, you know, this kind of Peter Pan syndrome amongst millennials meant that a lot of people had just not really internalized that they were aging. And the pandemic exacerbated this because everyone felt like we had hit pause. You know, everyone had felt like we hit pause for 18 months, but time kept going on. And all of a sudden they emerged and there's all these young, cool people who are kind of directing culture in a way that millennials thought they would always direct culture. And part of what I noticed was also that some of the aesthetic preferences of my peers suddenly looked conspicuously uncool. They looked like what old people wear. I mean, I think a lot of it was the hype beast stuff, you know, like the dad shoes. Balenciaga kind of like the triple S. And this is something that I. Yeah. The huge ones. I remember being at the Grove in L.A. once. And this is right before COVID began. It was spring 2019, I guess. And watching this kind of. probably 16 year old just look on with total disgust at his father who was just wearing a head to toe Balenciaga look. And, you know, I live in L.A. and you would just kind of see people. I think, you know, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill with the kind of scumbro aesthetic, the online ceramics, you know, like tie dye maximalism. It started to look a little silly when people's hair began to turn gray. Speaker 1 (16:53) Scumbro. I don't think I've heard that before. Speaker 2 (16:56) That was like a minor term that was used to describe like the kind of late 2010s Justin Bieber look. For sure. Well, I feel Speaker 1 (17:03) like we still see that. Like maybe it's the 2020s Justin Bieber look as well. Speaker 2 (17:08) It's stuck around.