GET COMFY
More than just a mannerist collage of the nostalgic aesthetic belonged to the millennial generation, Fashwave also operates to force classicism free of the post-modernist stranglehold that academic progressives have maintained over it, for a nearly a century. We would be mistaken to claim that the antiquated speculative nature of Fashwave betrays the aesthetic as a thing only predicated on nostalgia. While it might be considered a collage of sorts, stitched together from pieces of 80s and 90s pop-culture; VHS tapes, video game soundtracks, neo-noir landscapes, neon, lasers, synthesizers, streaking brake lights and 8-bit arpeggios—Fashwave only operates modally to subvert the mainstream progressive agenda by way of nostalgic cues to the otherwise uninterested.
The real strength and fascination of the aesthetic lies in its ability to draw a parallel between anachronistic futurisms; that is to say, what ideals were once held for tomorrow and have since fallen either out of favor, out of fashion, or out of plausibility—and icons of western art now so unpopular in the mainstream circles of acceptable media. Hovercrafts, jetpacks, Bond gadgets, terminator technology, apocalyptic analogues—dreams made into memories.
By carefully conflating these two ideas we might touch on the birth of a new mannerism: anachronism becomes the mode by which the canon of western thought and artistic enterprise suddenly and altogether vaults over the rhetorical barriers set in place by post-modernism and manned tirelessly by the drones of academia, to re-establishes itself as a countercultural force.
So it was that Piranesi’s Veduta di Roma series painted an image of Rome so fantastical that Goethe himself—a fan of Piranesi’s work—exclaimed his consuming disappointment upon first visiting the city, for it was less impressive than Piranesi’s drawings had led him to dream.
>Let us continue dreaming.
