Welcome Back, Social-Media Fall

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It is once again time for social media’s annual observance of “fall vibes”: An almost religious celebration of sweaters, falling leaves, hot beverages, and pumpkins. Fall-vibes content starts appearing in late July; it is a season especially embraced by the kind of people who arrive at a party half an hour early. This year, though, I’ve noticed that its articulation on the feeds has changed in important ways.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how fall vibes, as defined by momfluencers, have been fraught with anxiety. In the last decade since social-media season worship has taken shape, fall has frequently been narrated as a season of motherly relief: The long summer child-care crisis is over, the heat is lifting, and mom can finally exhale. With her renewed mental capacity, she might even buy a few decorative gourds. This year, for what feels like the first time, the vibes baton has been passed from millennial moms to Gen-Z people of all genders. Gen Z’s iteration of fall is different: more fun, weirder, less about control. The hand-off feels right to me.

Seasons are the original “trends.” Anticipating them, marking them, then mourning them was the very scaffolding of our existence for thousands of years. Today, marketing has replaced agriculture as the defining influence over our calendar years, but we still live by seasons, reconfigured as aesthetic categories with endless tiny variations (“tomato-girl summer” and “Strega Nona September” being a few recent examples).

The seasons represent a perfect marriage between universal relatability — nature! — and consumer culture. They also reflect the shared condition affecting many of us online denizens, for whom trend-observation has become a permanent cognitive orientation. We are all hyper-aware of the speed at which trends shift, so we often anticipate the end of a trend even as soon as we notice it. At three months, seasons are just the right length for a snappy yet robust trend cycle. Earth’s tilted axis: marketing gold.

While always uniquely suited to social-media capture, fall vibes are being more widely embraced this year than I’ve ever seen before. Fall vibes used to be serious, even disciplined — fall as return to order and calm after the bacchanal of summer. Today, in the hands of Gen Z, fall is defined by cheap and cheerful nostalgia. It has become kitsch. Fall’s kitschy connotations are as thick as Lenny Kravitz’s enormous scarf, which he now takes out of storage annually to mark the season.

Part of what makes fall so accessible to Gen Z is that you can create content about it from inside your bedroom, with a string of orange LEDs, a hot beverage, and a few pumpkin throw pillows. Summer doesn’t offer the same accessibility: Conjuring summer on the feed means vacations (costly) or bathing-suit content (not everyone’s thing). Fall is a great equalizer — you don’t have to go to Greece or pose half nude. All you have to do is go to Home Goods, buy some Halloween stuff, arrange it all in a tight little assemblage, and light a candle. Voilà: cozy season. It’s the People’s Season. Today,  social-media fall — which fetishizes an iteration of fall that occurs only in a fairly narrow band of latitudes — is observed globally, even in places like Brazil, where fall doesn’t look anything like it does in You’ve Got Mail. (Incidentally, You’ve Got Mail used to be the iconic expression of fall vibes onscreen, but it seems to have been eclipsed, this year, by Gilmore Girls.)

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera has a famous definition of kitsch in his 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. “Kitsch,” he wrote, “causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

Fall vibes, more than any other season’s social-media articulation, have become a celebration of the feeling of that second tear — because kitsch is itself a cozy feeling.

This is a change from just a few years ago. In the fall of 2021, I wondered whether the prevailing fall vibes at the time were a “cry for help.” Three years ago — an eternity in social-media years — Instagram, not TikTok, owned fall. TikTok had not incorporated season worship into its content maw and was still largely a place where people shared dances. Pandemic malaise had fully set in, and fall aesthetics were dominated by neutral tones and still images of very deliberate scenes: a mug of coffee beside an open book, arranged beside a window seat; a candle, a book, a pair of feet snuggled into slouchy, thick socks. Books played a starring role; there was an implicit maturity to cozy season, and an explicit femininity. These posts contained no sound, no narration. We were trying to romanticize isolation. I wondered if this cozy representation was a form of self-soothing, with creators fetishizing little pockets of control.

In 2021, we were gesturing toward a shared feeling of coziness, but we couldn’t quite conjure the real thing. Perhaps it was because millennials are older and notoriously try-hard, but our version of cozy season felt anodyne, airless, and fake. Gen Z has never been as interested in cosplaying perfection online as millennials, which has always made their content more dynamic. Gen Z fall is no exception.

If Instagram fall vibes in 2021 evoked a stay-at-home mom enjoying a moment’s peace, today’s fall vibes on Instagram and TikTok evoke a teenager with ADHD whose mom let them pick out treats on the Target run. It’s bath bombs in the shape of a cauldron and DIY pumpkin crafts that look like something you’d find at an elderly woman’s yard sale. It’s enjoying a PSL in bed while a yule log crackles on your iPad. It’s an enthusiastic satire of basic Insta-mom culture of the late 2010s, but it’s hard to tell where the satire ends — pumpkin spice living! — and the sincerity begins. In fact, it might not be satire at all.

I sought help from Casey Lewis, who writes the indispensable “youth culture cheat sheet” After School, to better understand what’s going on with their enthusiastic embrace of fall.

“What we know about Gen Z is that they’re homebodies,” she said. “They like to nest. Summer doesn’t really lend itself to that, and especially with brat summer driving people to be more social, or driving up the FOMO from all the socializing, there’s something about fall that invites you to lean into nesting. I think, as a season, fall seems to mimic or suit Gen Z.”

One important reason why fall vibes have shifted from aspirational to homespun and zany is that the appeal of “aspirational” content itself is changing. In a marketing report on “next gen influence,” the Canadian creative agency We Are Social reports that “Today, truly aspirational content — the stuff viewers model their lives after — is having to change shape to stay realistic. With soaring cost of living, new challenges in forging romantic connections, and the ever-present chance that much of today’s housing could be underwater in a few decades, most people are striving for stability, not luxury.”

Lewis echoed this perspective. “Anyone can bake pumpkin cookies and create aesthetic content around that,” she said.

This is great news for Amazon, which has stepped into the aspirational-home-décor void left by the likes of Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware with the aggressive marketing of cheap trash in cute seasonal themes that looks good in a Reel or TikTok but will almost certainly give you a rash and will absolutely never in a million years biodegrade. This is the stuff of today’s fall vibes: the candles, leaf-garlands, throw pillows, scarves, animatronic Beetlejuice heads, and the like.

Sometime last year, “boo baskets” appeared on TikTok. Boo baskets are Halloween gift baskets, and the story goes that they originated as a suburban neighborhood tradition, where neighbors would “boo” each other by dropping off Halloween-themed goodies on each other’s doorsteps. If you got “boo’d,” you’d have to boo someone else. People on Reddit affirm it was “a nice community-building tradition.”

I can only assume that a cunning marketing professional at Amazon became aware of the tradition of the neighborhood boo basket and decided to “make it a thing” by creating perusable collections of gift ideas. Today, the boo basket is shaping up to be a new “tradition” (I apply that term very loosely) wherein boyfriends and husbands buy their (usually female) “boo” a Halloween-themed gift basket. The basket might contain scented candles, pumpkin plushies, trending beauty stuff, maybe some Halloween-themed PJs or fall-themed accessories for her Stanley. High-status boo baskets usually include the latest color of Ugg Tazz slippers; this year apparently the color to get is “mustard seed.” All this adds up to the ultimate gift: the opportunity to show off about your sweet boyfriend while filming your TikTok unboxing content.

Fall vibes are still bound up with the practice of buying crap that won’t even last a year, and in that way, they have failed to meaningfully evolve. We may snort with derision about how materialistic Christmas or Mother’s Day is, but buying stuff is the only way most of us know how to mark an occasion — even the change of seasons. At the very least Gen Z is making it fun. I’m already wondering what next year’s fall vibes will look like. Perhaps there will be a surge of interest in scarecrow iconography — scarecrow-core. There will almost certainly be viral cookies and muffins for everyone to try. It’s hard not to love social-media fall. And, in the spirit of kitsch, to love to love it.