Of all the havoc unleashed on the world through TikTok, gen Z’s inclination to add the suffix “-core” to a word and call it an aesthetic may be the most pervasive. Most of these trend cycles pass faster than you can swipe – tenniscore, balletcore – but some managed to stick around long enough to define the year’s overall vibe.

According to the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (Cari), an online community and research server run by volunteers obsessed with documenting consumer aesthetics from the 70s onward, many of 2024’s most popular TikTok trends reflected our election anxiety and romanticized (supposedly) better days. From the resurgence of mid-2000s screensaver graphics to a collective longing for McMansion-style Tuscan kitchens, they offered an escape from our compounding existential crisis.

“Why are we inundated by [nostalgia]? I believe it’s because we can’t actually produce those things anymore, which means there’s kind of an authenticity in them,” said Sofia Lee, a visual artist and member of Cari.

She and Evan Collins, an architectural designer by day who co-founded Cari, explained the aesthetics that, in their opinions, took over in 2024.

Frutiger Aero

Technically, Frutiger Aero blew up in late 2023, but the trend grew into one of this year’s biggest aesthetics. An ode to the internet of the mid-aughts, Lee coined the term, a portmanteau of the Swiss typeface designer Adrian Frutiger, whose lettering work appeared as an early computer font, and Windows Aero, Windows Vista’s visual design language (think soothing green grass, blue skies, bubbles).

TikTok users who may not have even been alive when the software that inspired the trend hit the market now decorate their homes in the style, or go searching for Frutiger Aero-esque products in discount stores. On YouTube, they use the comforting visuals as the background for peaceful-sounding study playlists, while Etsy shops use them to hawk goods such as press-on nails, phone cases or mugs.

“A lot of young people are really into Frutiger Aero,” Collins said. “They create their own videos, collages and visuals for it.” He believes that’s because the aesthetic represents a hopeful time in tech, before the industry became synonymous with megalomaniac billionaires and impending doom. Gen Z may wish to return to a simpler era, but they ironically use today’s tools to re-create it: “Unfortunately, they incorporate a lot of AI into these Frutiger Aero designs,” Collins said, which sort of ruins the aura.

Whimsigoth

Stevie Nicks, Tiffany lamps, the house from Practical Magic: whimsigoth conjures a feeling of the occult, but cutesy. It’s an aesthetic seemingly plucked from a Tim Burton film, so it makes sense its revival would take place the same year he released a Beetlejuice sequel. Target even dropped a whimsigoth collection, which heavily played into the witch theme with lots of black dresses, moon motifs and blood-red lipsticks.

For Collins, the aesthetic harkens back to the dark opulence of the late 80s in reaction to our unstable decade.

“Whimsigoth emerged for the first time in the late 80s and early 90s, during a time of economic uncertainty and the Aids crisis,” he said. “At the time, it was a very queer aesthetic, and I think there are parallels between back then and our current situation of upheaval and uncertainty.”

Wacky Pomo

This year, Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV blew the lid off of 90s and early 2000s Nickelodeon as a toxic and allegedly abusive workplace. Still, an aesthetic dedicated to that era called “wacky Pomo” (short for postmodernism) celebrates its cartoonish, exaggerated visuals, from bulbous Pee-wee Herman sets to the maximalist decor of a suburban mall’s Build-A-Bear Workshop.

Collins believes there’s a sentimentality for such playful designs, especially in a current era in which minimalism reigns in home design. “Someone will make a slideshow of all these wacky Pomo aesthetics that are obnoxious, zany, all over the place and very bright,” Collins said. “People always comment, ‘Why can’t we have a return to these spaces? Why is everything so millennial, sad or beige?’”

Global village coffeehouse

In 2024, a Starbucks run is just that – in and out as quickly as possible. No one wants to linger at what has basically become a glorified public bathroom. But that wasn’t always the case: in the mid-90s, the coffee chain was a bonafide hangout, a place to see and be seen. According to Collins, gen Z likes to virtually re-create this feeling with “global village coffehouse”, a design motif identifiable by its warm earth tones, woodcut patterns and generally welcoming ambience.

“You think of the color, texture, the swirly patterns on the wall of a 90s coffeehouse, and a few years ago that was considered tacky,” Collins said. “But now people are romanticizing McMansions, or the Tuscan kitchen, which is amazing, because a few years ago that was inconceivable.”

Modern third spaces take a much more minimalist approach to decor: plywood benches, white walls, monstera plants. For fans of global village coffeehouse, this comes off as sterile and inhospitable. In one TikTok liked more than 142,000 times, a slideshow of photos from 90s coffeeshop interiors plays to the soundtrack of Starbucks favorite Norah Jones. “I miss feeling cozy in restaurants,” one person commented on the clip. “It just feels like a big warm hug,” another wrote.