The 'Vibe Shift' Is Here. 2022 Was Just Beginning.

"There's definitely an interest in getting away from the tyranny of casualness," said Sean Monahan, who started the whole Vibe Shift thing.

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Early in 2022, New York magazine published Allison P. Davis’s story “A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It?”

The idea of this vibe shift originated in Sean Monahan’s Substack

8Ball

. Monahan, founder of trend forecasting consultancy 8Ball, published an article in June of 2021 called “Vibe Shift,” describing the moment as a major point of cultural inflection, when popular tastes undergo a rare sea change. He wrote:

I’m hesitant to name our current vibe shift. It’s clearly a return to scene culture, contains 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.

The New York article framed the vibe as in flux — something that was “coming” for us instead of something that was already here — so I called Monahan to ask if, with 2023 on the horizon, the vibe has now shifted. He told me that it had shifted, to him anyway, around the time that he wrote his original Substack post. Back then, bars and restaurants were opening up, people were getting vaccinated, and normal life seemed poised to resume after the pandemic lockdowns, so conditions were ideal for culture to release itself onto a brand new splash pad.

When we talked on the phone this week, Monahan — who was previously known for naming “normcore” — asked if I had seen The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix. I hadn’t. He said, “In one of the episodes — and I'm paraphrasing here — Andy Warhol talks about how a couple years into a new decade, things start to look and feel different. The quote is something like, ‘There'll be new people and new faces and it takes a couple years into a decade for things to really get going. And that's when you decide who's going to make it into the future and who's going to be relegated to the past.’ And I feel like that's a bit what 2022 was for a lot of people, this realization that the last decade is over.”

This is based on my conversation with Monahan. Read on for explanation on each item.

Ahead, Monahan and I discuss the vibe shift and where the 2020s are going in more depth. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Where do you think culture is at right now?

I think we're still going through this kind of early 2000s nostalgia phase and that's going to last for a while. I went to the Celine Show in Los Angeles a week or so ago. One of my friends was like, “I think the indie sleaze thing is so over already.” And I was like, “Uh, I don't know.”

With some of my peers who work in the art world or the fashion world, I think that they might have a higher novelty preference and be cycling through micro-trends at a different clip than a broader consumer market. What's interesting to me is which things that kind of come out of that churn — of what I sometimes call the self-appointed avant-garde — actually make it through into something that impacts the way that people shop and dress and behave.

The Y2K trend has been quite dominant in fashion, particularly at the spring 2023 shows in September and October.

I feel like I know a lot of people who've been waiting for that to end.

I’m one of those people.

I think it's funny both the Y2K trend and the indie sleaze trend — they refer back to kind of a fuzzy period of time. It's not quite clear exactly what era people are talking about with the Y2K trend in the same way it's not quite clear what era people are talking about with the indie sleaze trend. Some people hear Y2K, and they're like, “Oh yeah, 1998.” And other are like, “2005.” And those were totally different times. The indie sleaze one, I feel like some people are like, “This is about the early E-girl era of Tumblr circa 2012.” And then other people are like, “No, this is about the downtown indie rock scene from 2002 to maybe 2007.” Those things can both be correct because nostalgia's always a weird reformation of disparate cultural signals and style cues.

Photo by Deon on Unsplash

In April of 2021, Anna Wintour predicted the pandemic would give way to a Roaring Twenties-style boom. Do you feel like you’re seeing that?

A little bit. A lot of people are getting interested in bespoke clothing and tailoring and gowns. There's been a couple of instances where I've seen some of my younger friends throw formal events. There's definitely an interest in getting away from the tyranny of casualness.

I think there was a time in the late 2010s where I just felt like everyone looked so boring, you know? You would walk around New York City, which used to have such great street style, and just be like, I can't tell if people are going to work or going to a party or going to the gym.

That may be true but I also don’t think the the tyranny of casualness is going anywhere.

It’s all kind of relative to some extent. I was talking to someone recently and about how a couple of years ago there was a flurry of articles about people feeling really frustrated about which fit of denim to wear. [Author’s note: it’s been called the “Jean Wars.”] People were, like, arguing — “Are skinny jeans back?” “Are flares back?” “Are baggy jeans back?” “Are mom jeans back?” And I think to a certain extent, that was kind of the fashion press realizing that the traditional hierarchy has broken down a little bit, where the fashion editors and the designers kind of set the agenda and then the fashion journalists kind of promote that to a broader audience and everyone gets on board.

I recently published a story about how the vibe shift is unlikely to include the Kardashians and that this decade, they are likely to fade as pop culture’s dominant celebrities. Do you agree?