(2022-02-16) A Vibe Shift Is Coming

Allison Davis: A Vibe Shift Is Coming. ...my friend Ellen messaged me: “Okay, please let me know if this person is dumb. But this stressed me out this morning.” She dropped a link to something titled “Vibe Shift,” an entry from a Substack called 8Ball, which turned out to be the weekly newsletter of a trend-forecasting consultancy founded by Sean Monahan. Previously, Monahan had helped found the now-defunct art collective K-HOLE

A vibe shift is the catchy but sort of too-cool term Monahan uses for a relatively simple idea: In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated.

Monahan, who is 35, breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed

• Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars;
• Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010–16), or the Blood Orange era, normcore, dressing like The Matrix, Kinfolk the club, not Kinfolk the magazine; and
• *Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch.

the thing that struck fear into Ellen’s heart was Monahan’s prediction that we were on the cusp of a new vibe shift.

not everyone survives a vibe shift

I haven’t stopped thinking about my own survival odds since.

It was reassuring to think the pandemic had hit PAUSE on life

Turns out, two years might have swooshed into a black hole, but I was cocky to think something wouldn’t fill the void.

His trend-forecasting ability materialized when he was getting his B.F.A. in painting at RISD. Even though he couldn’t get a job after he graduated in 2009, his studies gave him the ability to recognize the “tradition of western image making,” he says.

He channeled that into K-HOLE, the collective he started with his friends in 2011

In 2013, it recognized a specific way that people were “trying to navigate fashion and personal style in a kind of emergent social-media ecosystem that had kind of broken the old script for how to position yourself as interesting,” says Monahan. In short, normcore was a rebuke to being a bespoke snowflake and publicizing it on Instagram.

It’s also a meme Monahan can’t escape, he says with a sigh. Normcore went viral but didn’t make his group any money

K-HOLE dissolved in 2016

But brands will always need someone to explain TikTok microcultures to old losers. So even without the collective, Monahan has found success as a consultant for brands

Monahan had intended to drop a “Vibe Shift” follow-up on his Substack... Half a year later, he still can’t quite figure it out.

Monahan does have some theories, though: “I feel like the trajectory of the 2010s has been exhausted in a lot of ways.

And we had the rise of all these world-spanning, like, Sauron-esque big-tech platforms that literally have presences on every continent. People want to make things personal again.

He thinks the new vibe shift could be the return of early-aughts indie sleaze

return to a more fragmented culture.

Most promisingly, he predicts a return of irony

Monahan reassured me that it’s okay not to survive the shift. We all have permission to stay stuck at whatever makes us feel comfortable.