social media microlabels are coming for your identity

#corecorecore

It seems like everything in fashion is a core now. 

Wearing pastoral, handmade clothing? That’s cottagecore. Dirty, natural earth tones? That’s goblincore. What about lacy, rococo-inspired pastels? Angelcore has you covered. Depending on your wardrobe, you could also be clowncore, fairycore, grandmacore, or a comical menagerie of other options.

It doesn’t stop there: it seems that if you wear it, social media now has a way to label it. Whether you’re a clean girl, vsco girl, or simply coquette, some kind of specialized “aesthetic” has emerged to describe your sartorial preferences.

The Aesthetics Wiki lists over 150 “core” microlabels—many of which are entirely new to the past five years.

It wasn’t always like this. Yes, we had labels, but only because they were useful for differentiating broad social categories, like goth versus punk. In recent years, however, we’ve taken these categories and divided them so minutely that we now have to specify whether someone is a cybergoth, pastel goth, or a retronymic trad goth.

Social media algorithms are directly to blame for this development. Modern recommendation systems thrive on highly compartmentalized “microlabels,” since it’s easier for machines to understand us when they can categorize us into discrete units of information.

Part of this is to optimize engagement. If someone with similar social media patterns to you seems to like #cottagecore videos, the algorithm will then assume you’ll also engage with that content. The more SEO-friendly metadata out there, the better the algorithm can predict your preferences, so of course it would push new labels.

More concerningly, the microlabel revolution makes it easier to convert you into a consumer. With every #cottagecore video you encounter, you begin to identify more and more with the cottagecore aesthetic, since identity is socially constructed by the media you encounter. Eventually, you start buying cottagecore clothing to fit your new lifestyle as a cottagecore person, which is exactly what the social media platforms wanted you to do—after all, the TikTok and Instagram shops are eagerly selling those clothes one click away.

This isn’t speculation; this is an open secret. TikTok’s business platform outright claims that “subcultures are the new demographics,” and explicitly lays out their strategy:

our brand becomes part of their identity. TikTokers turn to subcultures to define their online and offline personas, which means they will actively seek out brands they can identify with and align to their true selves.

The page then goes on to give businesses ideas for how to profit off the cottagecore aesthetic through marketing partnerships.

Essentially, platforms and retailers are colluding to mass-produce identity-building metadata so that they can sell to those identities. Each new “aesthetic” represents a marketing opportunity—and the hyper-specificity is accelerating with fast fashion. Since microlabels are developing in tandem with social media trends, users (read: consumers) are prompted to hop from core to core to keep up with the latest cultural phenomena.

As a content creator, I’m also incentivized to feed into this process. Since we know that social media recommendation systems reward videos containing trending phrases, creators intentionally perpetuate popular microlabels to give our videos better chances of going viral. In some cases, we even create the labels: many influencers are deliberately attempting to coin new terms as trendbait for the metadata-hungry algorithm.

Beyond fashion, the same pattern is playing out across all corners of culture and media. Spotify daylists, for example, have gotten alarmingly detailed. “You listened to stressed and situationship on Thursday mornings,” my friend’s app explained to her as it recommended a playlist called “lovecore badminton thursday morning.” These, too, are all-new music microgenres created for the Spotify algorithm to make more personalized recommendations. Musical artists in turn feel forced to conform to categorizations like this, lest their songs fail to be pushed to new listeners.

While microlabels can be good for discovering new forms of self-expression, their overall effect dampens culture in the algorithmic era. Labels should help us figure out who we are but not define who we are, and yet that line is growing blurrier by the day. Creators, musicians, and retailers conform to what is trending rather than what they would otherwise want to make. Personal identity is subordinated in the pursuit of ever-increasing segmentation, with each subgroup encroaching on genuine individuality.

My stop-gap solution? Be careful with catchy new words on social media. Remember that the end goal of labels is to help the algorithm, and that the end goal of the algorithm is to help social media companies make money at your expense. We’ll probably only get more of these words as new trends and algorithms take hold of our culture, and while it’s okay to buy cottagecore clothing every now and then, you can fight back by reminding yourself that you’re not a cottagecoreperson—you are yourself.