How can you spot a ‘vibe shift’ that transforms popular culture? Ask me! I literally invented the term

In late 2019, I started spotting them in New York. Trucker hats. Everywhere. Worn by conspicuously youthful young men and often with tight, flared, dark denim jeans and black leather jackets, they looked out of time when everyone still thought streetwear – fancy trainers and expensive sportswear collaborations – was the future of fashion.

I appreciated their commitment to the mid-00s aesthetic. It made them look like a band. Two years later, my suspicions were confirmed when I met some trucker-hat wearers at a party. They were a band: the Hellp. In the intervening two years they went from looking out of time to looking right on time, and would prefigure “the vibe shift”, “indie sleaze,” or even simply “the return of rock” – whatever you might call it.

This sense of timeliness is, ultimately, what I was referring to when I coined the term “vibe shift” in an article on my Substack in June 2021. Why does something feel in or out of style? Why does one cultural object feel representative of an era while another doesn’t? The US supreme court judge Potter Stewart refused to define obscenity, saying in 1964 rather: “I know it when I see it.” Trends are a bit like this. You know them when you see them – you just have to have your pattern recognition goggles on. Much to the chagrin of my clients – I’m a trend forecaster – my methodology is more instinctual than factual.

The idea of a vibe shift was very much informed by the late spring of 2021. Covid at last had a vaccine and predictions of a “hot vax summer” peppered the US media. We could finally leave our houses. If the vibe shift felt more disjunctive than usual, our inability to experience street life for more than a year was probably the culprit. Millennials went into lockdown still feeling young, but they came out shocked to find the first cohort of Zoomers now ruling the roost.

I described the vibe shift as: “A return to scene culture, elements of ‘naughty aughties’ nostalgia. The players are personalities more interested in the literary than the artistic, more interested in the who follows, than the how many followers. Musically – well, I’ve already made my prediction: it’ll be a return of rock.”

In January 2022, six months after coining the term, I was approached by New York magazine for a piece about the vibe shift. The email brought on a sense of deja vu. In 2014, a similar scenario occurred. I was part of the trend-forecasting collective K-Hole that authored the original trend report on normcore. Similarly, New York magazine had published an article that made the term mainstream. When the normcore article came out, I was giving a presentation on New York’s nightlife crisis – uncomfortably ignoring the vibrating phone in my pocket. This time round, I was in Los Angeles for the Frieze art fair.

The time difference mercifully meant I was asleep when the initial wave of trend scepticism and bewilderment convulsed through Twitter. My mother texted and asked if “people were being mean to me online”. I told her not to worry. This, unfortunately, is how the sausage is made.

I suspect my list format is why so many people found the vibe shift confusing at first pass. Alas, vibes are never about just one thing. But I had an inkling that the vibe shift would stick around for a bit when I spotted a headline from the Evening Standard about how the economy had undergone “a vibe shift”. One friend joked that I had ingeniously rebranded all trends as “vibe shifts”.

There is some truth in this. The word “trend” has been much abused this past decade. The rise of warp speed virality on TikTok further confused the matter. Was the ice bucket challenge a trend? Were sea shanties a trend? Was the renegade dance a trend? I would categorise all three as fads or micro-trends. To address bigger changes in culture, behaviour and outlook perhaps the term vibe shift does a better job?

As “vibe shift” made its way through the Twitter machine, seemingly everything was dubbed as such. Marc Andreesen claimed Peter Thiel’s talk on crypto at Bitcoin Miami was the vibe shift, the New York Times claimed the optimism of molly-tripping Zoomers at Coachella was the vibe shift. Eater claimed the newly popular lo-fi aesthetics of food Instagram was the vibe shift. There’s a dose of truth in all of these opinions. But I’m sticking to my original list.

In retrospect, I believe the vibe shift is a return to fragmentation. Culturally, the 2010s were an era of centralisation. Subcultures died. Instagram reigned supreme. Logomania shifted fashion to a conspicuously branded look. Normcore clocked this interest in mass internet culture. It was also a coda to hipsterdom. “Why were art kids ditching their Red Wing boots for Nike Frees?” we asked.

Focused on the bespoke, the vintage, the artisanal and the niche, hipsterdom sought to escape the categorisation and homogenisation that consumerism had wrought, through a slightly tweaked version of consumerism. This brought us vintage stores, third-wave coffee, farm-to-table restaurants, zines, DIY venues, and indie music. Everything would be special. Everything would be unique.

But this was a big ask after social media and mobile computing had rendered everything increasingly accessible. That super-secret hole-in-the-wall restaurant with amazing food — that was on Yelp. That in-the-know vintage store whose prices hadn’t skyrocketed — that was in a Vogue listicle. The vibe shift, I would argue, is a response to the increasingly illegible nature of the internet. You can’t Google an Instagram post.

In many ways, the viral success of the vibe shift is due to the nostalgia dynamic. Millennials have long been caught in a “Peter Pandemic” – unable to see themselves as the adults they now are. Millennials, too, are so obsessed with youth that middle age seems like a sort of social death. (My original report on normcore was not titled “Youth mode” for nothing.)

Proof that it’s happening? Last week in Los Angeles, Celine debuted a new collection followed by performances by the Strokes, the Kills, Interpol and Iggy Pop. From my view in the pit, watching the Strokes play Is This It, I saw a new flipping of the script. People putting away their phones to bum-rush the stage as bewildered security guards attempt to shoo them away. The internet is mundane. Real life is where the action is.